Research team

Expertise

My expertise grows out of the fields of Modern German Literature (PhD 2008, Trier) and Germanic Media Studies and Cultural Studies (habilitation 2019, Duisburg-Essen). I am particularly interested in German-language culture and literature from the 18th century to the present, with a focus on the 20th century and the present. I concentrate on three fields: First, I work on the systematization and sustainable establishment of web literary studies, which is especially interested in the follows of digitization and communication in social media for literature, for literary communication and for the work and publication practices of literary studies itself. As a subdiscipline of digital humanities and of digital literary studies, web literary studies analyzes, among other things, digital literature and web literature, new forms of digital publishing (in literature and in the open humanities), digital literacy, digital memory culture, and new models of author’s rights. Second, I develop studies of subversion, based on the broad model of political writing that I built in my book „Literatur und Subversion“. I apply this model to contemporary (German-language) literature, to avant-garde and experimental literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, and meanwhile also to subversive films, music, and web artists. Third, I work on comparative studies of multilingual literature in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands and on the reflection of (urban) spaces in literature, especially of Brussels and the Ruhr Area.