PhD students 3rd cohort

2012-2014 Bachelor studies at Anne Arundel Community College

2014-2017 Bachelor of Arts in English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland

2018-2021 Master of Arts in North American studies at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg; research assistant and copyeditor in Islamic Religious studies and North American studies

seit 2021  PhD student and research associate in North American studies in Graduiertenkolleg “Modell Romantik”

New World Ordering: Romantic Poetics, Transforming Colonized Ecologies, and the American and Harlem Renaissances

In this comparative dissertation project I read literary examples of the American and Harlem renaissances for the ways they employ romantic discourse – of home, of seasons, of intersecting natural, cultural, and cosmic forces – toward a transformation of life on a colonized American continent. As scholars have read traditionally romantic authors like John Clare and William Wordsworth, I suggest that texts by exemplary authors of these renaissances – especially Margaret Fuller, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer – situate themselves as dynamic forces in postcolonial ecologies: reshaping malleable networks of human and non-human fields of power, and thereby building new material-discursive worlds. Through new materialist, romanticist, Black studies, and ecosemiotic theoretical approaches, I build comparative critical close readings of these renaissance – or rebirth – literatures alongside, and in resistance to, modern power over land and life.

Criticism:

• “‘Water, Water Everywhere’: Converging Flows of Power at Niagara Falls in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes.” Iperstoria 18 (Spring 2022). Forthcoming.
• “Measured Life: Making Live, the ‘Modern System of Science,’ and the Animated Bodies of Frankenstein.” ZAA: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 69, no. 4 (2021): 331–48.
• “‘A Thing Apart’: Sonnet Poetics and Radical Politics in Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows.” aspeers 14 (2021): 15–31.

Select poems:

• “Subdued Ochre,” Miracle Monocle
• “Fault Line,” Cold Mountain Review
• “Amerikanistik,” Columbia Journal
• “Hide the Screens,” EcoTheo Review
• “The New Law,” “Peripatetics,” “The New Frontier,” “Stripes,” SOFTBLOW
• “The End of a Line,” Yes, Poetry

• Panelist for Bavarian America Academy’s “A View from Abroad: Young Scholars’ Panel on Election Night 2020,” November 2020
• Poetry reading at FAU Language Lab poetry reading, August 2020, Erlangen
• Poetry reading at RIIA “Mobilities and Transformations” conference, July 2019, Erlangen