About

I am Professor for Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (W1) at the University of Trier, where my research and teaching explore three interrelated strands: 1) post- and decolonial literatures with an emphasis on Africa and its diasporas, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean World, 2) postcolonial Environmental Humanities and 3) Anglophone media cultures.

Previously, I held a postdoctoral research position at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn, focusing on slavery’s global entanglements in the Black Atlantic world and beyond. I am currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled “Black Atlantic Ecologies: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Black Life Writing beyond the Colonial Anthropocene,” which intertwines forms and media of black life writing with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ecologies.

In my research and teaching I am particularly attentive to how texts, performances and visual art may relate to aesthetic, material and political formations of resistance, refusal and repair. My research interests span broadly from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, with occasional dips into earlier centuries.

I received my PhD in English Literature from Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg. Published as Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Worlds (2021, Palgrave), it explores contemporary Anglophone literature, culture and new media forms in interplay with post- and decolonial feminism, queer studies and affect theory in the works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel.

I received my MA in English Literature, American Literature and Comparative Literature from King’s College London and Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, with a thesis on the (de)construction of postcolonial female voice and identity in neo-Victorian narratives (A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love).

My work has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Volkswagen Stiftung, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Max Weber Stiftung, the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften Würzburg, Erasmus+, and competitive internal funding schemes at JMU Würzburg and University of Bonn.

Research and Teaching Interests:

Contemporary Anglophone literatures, Anglophone literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Caribbean Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, Indian and Indian Diaspora literatures, Black Britain, Environmental Humanities and Ecocriticism, the Blue Humanities, Victorian Ecologies, Neo-Victorian literature, Gender and Queer Studies, Media Studies, the Digital Humanities.