Degrees

Ph.D., Comparative Literary Studies and German, Northwestern University
B.A., Philosophy, Yale University 

Teaching Interests 

In my teaching, I bring together works from the German-language literary and cultural traditions with contemporary concerns of politics, racialization, migration, gender/sexuality, law, and much more. I teach survey courses from 1800 to the present, seminars on “Literature after Fascism” and “Borders, Migration, Gender,” as well as German language courses. I also have a great interest in teaching German poetry and poetics, the works of Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Benjamin; the tradition of Critical Theory; and philosophies and literatures of education. From 2019 to 2022, I worked with the Northwestern Prison Education Program, including as Director of Volunteer Development, and I recently started working with Western Mass CORE, a program run by Holyoke Community College that facilitates work in local jails and beyond. 

Research Interests 

My publications and research interests span Germanophone (and to a lesser degree Francophone) literatures from 1750 to the present; philosophy and literary theory; theories of nationalism, gender, and racialization; and the history of the senses as well as ecocriticism. My first book, titled Common Scents: Poetry, Modernity, and a Revolution of the Senses (SUNY Press, 2024), produces an account of why smell has long been the most neglected of our senses and how deodorization has shaped our understanding of (ocularcentric) modernity. As the book shows in case studies of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Brecht, and Ponge, olfaction—as a modulation of our condition of “being-in-the-air”—constitutes a largely forgotten but highly significant site of contestation for questions of corporeality, mediality, and politics.

I have also begun work on a second project, under the working title “Toward a Critique of Masculinity: Postfascist Bodies in Germany and Austria.” Building on the account of the relationship between bodies and politics proposed in Common Scents, I investigate the link between nationalism and sexuality/gender by focusing on how a body politic is shaped by concepts and practices of masculinity. The project looks at a wide range of West German and Austrian authors (Koeppen, Schmidt, Bachmann, Fritsch, Hubert Fichte, Jelinek, and others) as well as artists (for instance the Viennese Actionists) who attempt to reconstruct, repair, or destroy masculinities after the catastrophe of fascist-masculinist sexual politics in Nazi Germany. 

Recent scholarly articles of mine have appeared in Colloquia Germanica ("Bindungsroman: Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann"), Comparative Literature (“Toward an Aesthetics of Obscurity: from Baumgarten to Blanchot”), The Germanic Review, CR: The New Centennial Review (on palindromes), and arcadia (on Walter Benjamin's politics of pedagogy). For the journal Merkur, I recently wrote about contemporary politics and German memory culture (here). Forthcoming articles will appear with Modern Language Notes and New German Critique. 

I have also presented or will present work at national and international conferences, as well as at Harvard University, New York University, Rutgers University, the University of Chicago, the University of Verona, and the College for Humanities und Social Sciences of the Universitätsallianz Ruhr.