I am a German literary scholar at the University of Würzburg, currently holding a fellowship in the Field of Excellence Dimensions of Europe at the University of Graz (Austria). I completed my PhD on the narratology of space, later examining aspects of space, mobility, health, and environment in the works of Döblin, Kafka, Th. Mann, U. Timm, and Ch. Kracht. I also have a keen interest in the apprenticeship novel, researching its origins, with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre (1795/96) as the most prominent example, and tracing the genre’s history up to the present day.
In recent years, I have also delved deeply into the history of drama, opera, and theatre, exploring humor in German comedy from the 17th to the early 19th century in my second book. I have since published on the rise of emotionally moving writing strategies in Zemire et Azor (1771), the book and performance history of popular libretti, as well as examining Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767/69) and Kleist’s Der Zerbrochene Krug (1808/1832).
Please find a list of my current reasearch activities here.
It is very important to me to study literature hermeneutically. I love to engage in thorough philological work on both printed and handwritten fiction, connecting it with the history of ideas and cultural capital. In addition, I have also started to investigate large language models and their relation to interpretation and literary history (see „Emotions in Drama“). A project on shifts in meaning in moral language from 1650 to 1830 has just been approved for funding by the German Research Foundation (DFG).