Research areas
Law and Literature, Economic Humanities, Environmental Humanities, African American Literature and Culture, Relational Sociology and Sociology of Literature, Popular Culture and Film, Narratology
Research projects
Citizenship in Contemporary US Lyric and Law
This book project focuses on recent US lyric poetry that addresses issues of citizenship, race, indigeneity, and sovereignty. While Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2015) is an obvious example, the book will also include works by Craig Santos Perez, Layli Long Soldier, and others. The book seeks to contribute to current debates about the limits and possibilities of the concept of citizenship today. Moreover, with narrative as the dominant category in law and literature research in the last two decades, research into poetry and law has been relatively scarce. This project therefore also seeks to close this research gap by focusing specifically on how poetry contributes to legal discourses by going beyond some of narrative’s major constraints.
Scale in Environmental Literatures
Environmental scholars and authors like Lawrence Buell and Amitav Ghosh have long argued that environmental crises and climate change in particular are also crises of culture and the imagination. One of the central representational challenges that critics have repeatedly identified is scale: how to convey the „slow violence“ of environmental pollution and rising sea levels or the planetary, rather than local impact of these processes. This project looks at the aesthetics of such representational strategies in anglophone literatures and pays special attention to genre differences as well as to questions of environmental justice. Initial research has focused on the formal affordances of archipelagoes in prose and poetry.
Corporate Storytelling
This project takes a look at corporate philosophies and how they have developed in the digital age. Originally understood to consist of instructive narratives meant to guide and essentially to manage employees in the spirit of their company, corporate philosophies have transformed into essential components of brands and have travelled beyond the bounds of corporate cubicles. In the digital age, they have begun to inform the work of crowd workers as well as consumers and they are encoded in the algorithms that define the digital infrastructure.