I am a scholar working at the intersection of queer studies and German cultural history
Based in Vancouver, I am an Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of British Columbia. My research interests include literary, film and media cultures; queer cultural practices; and queer diaspora studies. This work variously engages and contributes to scholarship in affect, narrative, and queer theory.
Full bio & list of current projects can be found here.
My latest book.
The late nineteenth century marked a moment of transition in German literature: as the reading public and literary marketplace dramatically expanded, writers’ working conditions became increasingly unstable. Drawing on feminist, queer, and affect theory, I developed the analytic of "fragile poetics" to examine how writers’ anxieties about their creative efficacy register in their writing.
Fragile Poetics not only advances novel readings of canonical authors such as Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Storm, and Bertha von Suttner but also opens up new avenues to rethink literary history from the vantage point of precarity.
SUNY Press, 2027 (forthcoming in April). You can pre-order the hardback here. A paperback edition is slated to be published Fall 2027.
My first book.
Released in 1919, Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated the film's moving storyline, while conservative detractors succeeded in prohibiting public screenings. Banned and partially destroyed after the rise of Nazism, the film was lost until the 1970s and only about one-third of its original footage is preserved today. My book examines the structures of queer mourning facilitated by the film on the basis of its over 100-year-old reception history.
A shorter writeup based on the book was published in The Conversation. You can also learn more about this work in an interview I did for the New Books Network.
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023. You can purchase the book here.