About

I am an associate professor of German and currently the chair of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. My research broadly spans film and media as well as theater and performance studies. My first book, Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema, explores the contemporary film movement the Berlin School through a recalibration of the body, movement, spectacle, sensation, and spectatorship in cinema. My second book, Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Contemporary Berlin, examines contemporary transnational theater in Berlin through the affective-political scope of anger as an attributed and justified affect that responds to social injustice. This book presents a return to political theater and a rethinking of the novel ways in which art and resistance intersect. My third book, A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive, investigates how documentary film can challenge conventions of listening and recording shaped by histories of colonial ethnography and extraction. My latest book project focuses on motherhood, film, and negative affect. It makes a bold claim for the steady emergence of a new cinema on maternity that embraces and explores the burdens of motherhood.

I completed my Ph.D. at Indiana University in 2014. From 2014 to 2016, I was a Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. After that, I spent a year at Stanford University as the William H. Bonsall Acting Assistant Professor of German. Between 2017 and 2022, I was an assistant professor at Lehigh University. My research has been supported by grants from SSHRCC, DAAD, and the Humboldt Foundation.

Courses

• German Language (Intermediate)
• German Communication and Composition
• German Conversation and Film
• Text and Context: Displacement and Exile