Professional Appointments 

12/2025 - present     
Privatdozent, Department of Literature, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University Berlin

10/2024-03/2025       
Visiting Professor of American Studies, English Department, Ruhr University Bochum
 
10/2023-07/2024       
Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Literature, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University Berlin
 
01/2022-03/2022       
Part-time Lecturer, Humanities Core, University of Chicago
                                        
04/2017-03/2020       
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Literature, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University Berlin
 
10/2015-03/2017       
DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English, University of Chicago
 
10/2013-09/2015       
Postdoctoral Fellow, Graduate School of North American Studies, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University Berlin
 
10/2012-09/2013       
Lecturer, Institute for English and American Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main
 
04/2012-07/2012       
Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Literature, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University Berlin
 
04/2009-09/2011       
Lecturer, Department of Literature, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University Berlin
 
04/2008-07/2008       
Adjunct Lecturer, Western European Literatures, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)

Education
 
01/2025          
Habilitation, North American Literature and Culture, Free University Berlin
 
05/2011          
Dr. phil., summa cum laude, American Studies, Free University Berlin
 
02/2002          
M.A., American Literary History, American Cultural History, Communication Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich

Freie Universität Berlin      

 MA -Hauptseminar Detective Fiction (Sommersemester 2026)   

MA-Hauptseminar „Crime and Punishment“ (Sommersemester 2024)

BA Colloquium Literature/Culture (Wintersemester 2023/4)

University of Chicago   

 BA-Seminar „Reading Cultures II: Travel” (Wintertrimester 2022)

Freie Universität Berlin        

MA -Hauptseminar "Crime and Punishment" (Sommersemester 2024)  

BA-Colloquium Literature/Culture, (Wintersemester 2023/24)

MA-Hauptseminar "Methods in Literary and Cultural Studies" (mit Prof. Winfried Siemerling) (Wintersemester 2019/20)

BA-Orientierungsmodul "Introduction Literary Studies I" (Wintersemester 2019/20)      

• Law and Literature
• Environmental Aesthetics
• Literature and Politics
• Critical Theory

Monograph

Landschaft und Territorium: Amerikanische Literatur, Expansion und die Krise der Nation, 1784-1866 (Landscape and Territory: American Literature, Expansion, and National Crisis, 1784-1866). Paderborn: Fink, 2014.

 Articles

 “Causation.” In Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature, edited by Simon Stern and Robert Spoo. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025: 61-64.

 “Poetry at War: Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Stephen Crane.” In Handbook of American Poetry, edited by Sabine Sielke. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025. 195-213.

 “‘Oracles of the Law’: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s Legal Futurism.” Law & Literature 36:3 (2024): 465-480.

 “‘Shedding a Little Ink’: Melville’s Victorian War Poetry.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 21:3 (2019): 115-132.

 “Settler Colonial Statistics: Jefferson, Biopolitics, and Notes on the State of Virginia.” Early American Literature 54:1 (2019): 69-96.

 “‘The Spectre of Uncertainty’: Chance in Bellamy’s Utopian Fictions.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 60:4 (2015): 417-434.

 “Melville’s Battle-Pieces and the Environments of War.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 60:4 (2014): 495-532.

 “Die Politik des Perfektionismus” (“The Politics of Perfectionism”). In Happy Days: Lebenswissen nach Cavell (Happy Days: Wisdom after Cavell), edited by Kathrin Thiele and Katrin Trüstedt. Paderborn: Fink, 2009: 187-191.

 “Helen Levitt: 10 Photographs.” PhiN: Philologie im Netz 25 (2003): 1-30, http://www.fu-berlin.de/phin/phin25/p25t1.htm

 Reviews

 Justice in the New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America, edited by Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross. ALH Online Review 30:1 (2022): 1095–1098. Web.

 Beyond the Civil War Hospital: The Rhetoric of Healing and Democratization in Northern Reconstruction Writing, 1861-1882, by Kirsten Twelbeck. Anglia: Journal of English Philology 138:1 (2020): 194–197.

 Enemies of All Humankind: Fictions of Legitimate Violence, by Sonja Schilling. ZAA/Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 67:2 (2019): 235-8.

 Surveyors of Customs: American Literature as Cultural Analysis, by Joel Pfister. Amerikastudien/American Studies 63.1 (2018). Web.

 American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production 1500 - 1900, edited by Martin Brückner and Hsuan L. Hsu. Amerikastudien/American Studies 55:1 (2010): 165-167.

 Translations

 Martin Harries. “Das Ende einer Trope der Welt” (“The End of a Trope for the World”). In Theatrum Mundi: Die Metapher des Welttheaters von Shakespeare bis Beckett ( ‘If Then the World a Theatre Present’: Revisions of the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor in Early Modern England), edited by Björn Quiring. Berlin: August Verlag, 2012: 61-87, from the English.

Andreas Höfele. “Porträts der Hydra: Das Theater und die vielköpfige Menge” (“Portraits of Hydra:Theatre and the Many-headed Multitude”). In Theatrum Mundi: Die Metapher des Welttheaters von Shakespeare bis Beckett ( ‘If Then the World a Theatre Present’: Revisions of the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor in Early Modern England), edited by Björn Quiring. Berlin: August Verlag, 2012: 191-217, from the English.