World Languages and Cultures

I am recently relocated to Corvallis after having spent a decade at the University of Rochester as Associate Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages & Cultures, Affiliate Faculty in the Film & Media Studies Program, and Associate Faculty in the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies.

I am the author of Mothers, Comrades & Outcasts in East German Women's Films (Indiana University Press, 2016), and have published on East German and post-unification cinema in Seminar and Women in German Yearbook. I am also the co-editor of Spectacle: German Visual Culture, vol. 2 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015) and How to Make the Body: Difference, Identity and Embodiment, Visual Cultures and German Contexts series (New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2019). I am currently working on a collaborative book and documentary film project that explores the story of former Namibian refugees in East Germany, and am a member of the Digital Feminist Collective.

As an educator and a scholar in the humanities, I am interested in how digital technologies enable collaborative knowledge production in the public sphere. On my audio-visual criticism blog, I explore the audio-visual essay as a medium that is particularly relevant for film & media studies, and gender & sexuality studies. Combining the argumentative structure of the academic essay with the practice of filmmaking, audio-visual criticism provides us with a unique perspective on our objects of study and an opportunity for the creative production of knowledge.