I am a German literary scholar at the University of Würzburg, working currently as a Max Kade Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago from August to December 2024.
I completed my pdh on narratology of space, later examining space, migration, health and environment in the works of Döblin, Kafka, Timm, and Kracht. I have a keen interest in the apprenticeship novel, researching its origins, 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, exploring humor in German comedy from 17th to early 19th century in my second book. I have since published on the the raise of emotionally moving writing strategies in Zemire et Azor (1771), and 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).
It is very important to me to study literature both hermeneutically and digitally. On one hand, I engage in thorough philological work on both printed and handwritten fiction, connecting it with the history of ideas and cultural capital. On the other hand, I explore quantitative methods, especially the findings from large language models and their relation to interpretation (see project page „Emotions in Drama„).
Following the conference on the ethics of emotions in drama („Ethik der Emotionen im Drama vom Anfang des 17. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderst„) in March 2024 at the IZEA in Halle, I am currently planning a conference in fall 2024 at the UIC Chicago on „Rewriting Literary History with Algorithms.“
