I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in the German Department at Dickinson College for the academic year 2011-2012. I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Princeton University in 2011. I have taught all levels of German language and literature, both at Princeton as a lecturer and as a graduate student, as well as at Rutgers University and Drew University. While completing my Ph.D. I was also employed as a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Princeton's McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning. My research and teaching combines the formal study of literature and film with the consideration of the cultural relevance of aesthetic works within Austria, Germany, and North America. By maintaining both perspectives, I show my students that cultural knowledge is essential for our understanding of aesthetic works, while these works can also provide key insights into a given culture.
My dissertation, entitled Talking with One's Selves: Contemporary Autobiography Beyond Self-Identity, considered how seeing things from multiple perspectives not only characterizes our relationships with external phenomena and works of art, but also how we relate to ourselves. I examined how contemporary autobiography undergoes a dramatic transformation as authors begin to understand themselves as an aggregate of distinct voices, each with its own story to tell, rather than as a self-identical unity. Writing an autobiography becomes the process of bringing these voices into dialogue. I am currently expanding this work to focus on the difficulties inherent in representing multiethnic and multilingual lives.
My current research focuses on the intersections between sport and society in German speaking countries throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Sport has grown from an interesting, yet marginal phenomenon at the end of the nineteenth century to become a key area of cultural life. Sport pervades our lives and is often a means for perpetuating highly normative and conservative values. My research focuses on the way aesthetic works, primarily films, images, and literary texts, often provide us with new critical perspectives on sport. While not rejecting sport outright, these works consider both how sport has gained such a dominant position in contemporary society and how its moral, racial, and gender normativity can be mitigated. I had the opportunity to teach a course on this topic at Rutgers University in the spring semester of 2011 (syllabus).