About

I am an Associate Professor of German Studies in the Department of German and Russian Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY). My research explores German modernism, Philosophical Anthropology, photography, science fiction, Marxism, critical theory, and the literature, culture, and thought of the Weimar Republic. A common theme of my scholarship is an interest in the ways in which writers grappled with concepts of modernity, modernization, and modernism. Broadly speaking, my methodology joins the close reading of literary, philosophical, and aesthetic texts to a consideration of the cultural, historical, rhetorical, and epistemic contexts they emerged from and shaped; my research is driven by the concern that discursive, historical, and theoretical frameworks should be articulated from within the fine grain of these texts rather than assumed in advance and imposed on them from the outside. My writing has appeared in German Studies Review, The German Quarterly, Monatshefte, The Germanic Review, and Modernism/modernity, among other venues.

My book, Biological Modernism: The New Human in Weimar Culture (Northwestern UP), identifies an intellectual current in the Weimar Republic that drew on biology, organicism, vitalism, and other discourses associated with living nature in order to redefine the human being for a modern, technological age. Contrary to the assumption that any turn toward the organic indicated a reactionary flight from modernity or a longing for wholeness, biology and other discourses of living nature in fact offered a nuanced way of theorizing modernity rather than fleeing from it. Organic life, instead of representing a stabilizing sense of wholeness, by the 1920s had become a scientific, philosophical, and disciplinary problem. In their work, figures such as Alfred Döblin, Ernst Jünger, Helmuth Plessner, and August Sander interrogated the relationships between technology, nature, and the human, thereby radically reconfiguring the relationship between the disciplines as well as the epistemological and political consequences for defining the human being.

Biological Modernism received an Honorable Mention for the 2020 DAAD/GSA book prize, and has been reviewed in Modern Language Review, The German Quarterly, The Germanic Review, Monatshefte, Modernism/modernity, and the Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie.

I am on the editorial board of The German Quarterly and serve as an academic delegate with the Binghamton chapter of United University Professions. I am currently working on a second book project on early German-language science fiction as a literary discourse that mediated between modernization and modernism.

At Binghamton University I teach courses ranging from first-semester German to larger courses taught in English, which are frequently cross-listed in the departments of Art History, Cinema, Comparative Literature, English, and Philosophy. These courses cover diverse topics including 18th to 21st-century literature, visual culture and film, literary theory, and critical theory. My teaching aims to reflect both my education as a generalist in German and my expertise in specific areas of scholarly inquiry. Some of my favorite courses that I have designed and taught include “Learning to See: Art & Media in Weimar Germany,” “Introduction to Marx & Critical Theory,” “Staging Revolutions,” and “Cold War Science Fictions.”