Working at the intersections of German Studies, literary studies, and queer studies, my research has two main aims. First, I contribute to a new turn in German Studies away from applying an abstractly queer theoretical lens to canonical authors and texts and toward studying overlooked queer authors and texts themselves, thereby recasting our understanding German literary history. Second, by engaging extensively with major debates and scholars in queer studies and theory, I bring the neglected German context to queer and feminist debates around topics such as normativity, desire, subjectivity, and relationality. As you’ll see below, I actively publish in both fields in pursuit of a cross-disciplinary conversation.
You can find my academic CV here.
Book Project
In my current book project, The Times of Their Lives: Queer and Female Modernism, 1910–34, I investigate the relationships between time and sexuality and how they interact on and with the page in modernist literature. Through close readings of the prose—novels, novellas, diaries, essays, letters—of Robert Musil, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Klaus Mann, Siegfried Kracauer, and Marieluise Fleißer, I analyze how the rhythms of erotic desires mold time and how time inflects sexuality. I show how these authors’ female and queer characters in particular simultaneously are shaped by and exert control over the entwined narrative articulations of time and sex. In doing so, they generate original modernist worlds and sensibilities adjacent to, yet distinct from, what we’ve come to understand as canonical modernism.
Other Research Projects
I created, produce, and co-host a new podcast about gay literature and culture during the 1970s, the first season of which will be released in Summer 2024. Moreover, I am starting a Substack newsletter of literary and cultural criticism focusing on forgotten gems of gay English-language literature.
Scholarly Publications & Book Reviews
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
“Remaking the German Studies Curriculum: A Diversifying Approach,” Expanding German
Studies Blog, October 30, 2020. (Link here.)
“Teaching German Queerly: An Integrative Approach,” Diversity, Decolonization, and the
German Curriculum Blog. July 14, 2020. (Link here.)
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles & Book Chapters
“Mapping Queer Berlin: The Potential of Virtual Reality Pedagogy for the Language Classroom,” in “Form,” special issue of Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German 57, no. 2 (Fall 2024) (accepted & forthcoming)
“The Role of Reading and Queer Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century Germany.” Queer Print Cultures, eds. Vance Byrd and Javier Samper Vendrell, University of Toronto Press, 2024. (forthcoming)
“Friends with Benefits: Friendship and Queer Temporality in Klaus Mann’s Der fromme Tanz (1926) and Siegfried Kracauer’s Georg (1934),” in “Rupture, Slowness, Untimeliness: Queer Time and History in German Studies,” special issue of Monatshefte 114, no. 3 (Fall 2022).
“In der Zwickmühle der Zeit: Marieluise Fleißer’s Mehlreisende Frieda Geier (1931) and the Non-Simultaneities of Gendered Subjectivity,” The German Quarterly 94, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 466-483. (Link here.)
Book Reviews
Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Emancipation in Imperial Germany (University of Toronto Press, 2023), in Monatshefte (accepted and forthcoming 2024)
The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), in “Queering Sexual and Gendered Citizenship in the ‘Modern World,’” special issue of Canadian Journal of History 57, no. 3 (2022): 181-183.
The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body, Alys X. George (The University of Chicago Press, 2020), in The German Quarterly 95, no. 2 (2022): 220-222. (Link here.)
Robert Walser: A Companion, eds. Samuel Frederick and Valerie Heffernan (Northwestern UP, 2018), in Studies in Twenty and Twenty-first Century Literature 45, no. 1 (2021), Article 13 (Link here.)
Queering German Culture, ed. Leanne Dawson (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018) in German Studies Review 42, no. 1 (2019). (Link here.)
Conference Papers
2023: FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS: QUEER FRIENDSHIP AND TIME IN SIEGFRIED KRACAUER’S GEORG“
Presented at the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland.
2023: MAPPING QUEER BERLIN: THE POTENTIAL OF VIRTUAL REALITY FOR EQUITY AND INCLUSION IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM
Presented at the Chicago Language Symposium, hosted at Northwestern University.
2023: WE’RE GAY AND FREE—NOW WHAT? ANDREW HOLLERAN, MAX WEBER, AND THE ENCHANTMENT OF GAY LIFE
Presented at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference.
2022: AESTHETICIZING THE WORLD: CAMP, QUEER SENSIBILITY, AND THE RE-ENCHANTMENT OF THE MODERN WORLD IN WEIMAR GERMANY
Presented at the 2022 German Studies Association Conference for the panel “Style as a Way of Life: Sexuality, Aesthetics, Ethics.”
2021: A QUEER REPUBLIC OF LETTERS: BRUNO VOGEL’S ALF AND THE ROLE OF READING IN HOMOSEXUAL CITIZENSHIP
Presented at the 2021 Modern Language Association Conference for the panel “Queer Print Cultures.”
2020: TO BE UNDERSTOOD IS TO BE DESIRED: SEXUAL LOVE AND METAPHOR IN ROBERT MUSIL’S EARLY FICTION
Presented at 2020 German Studies Association Convention for the panel “Robert Musil as Sexual Theorist: Polyvocal Eros and the Problem of Form.”
2020: PANEL SERIES: ROBERT MUSIL AS SEXUAL THEORIST
At the 2020 German Studies Association Conference, I co-organized a series of panels dedicated to the work of Robert Musil and his fictional literature as a space for theorizing human sexuality in all its forms. The two panels were: “Robert Musil as Sexual Theorist (1): Polyvocal Eros and the Problem of Form” and “Robert Musil as Sexual Theorist (2): Desire, Dissolutions, and Disorientations.”
2020: CONTINUITY AND RUPTURE IN QUEER STUDIES; OR, THE EXAMPLE OF KLAUS MANN’S DER FROMME TANZ
Presented at the 2020 conference “The Past and Present of Queer German Studies Conference,” hosted virtually at the University of British Columbia.
2019: KLAUS MANN’S DER FROMME TANZ AND HOMOSEXUALITY AS LIFE
Presented at the 2019 workshop “The Mann Family: Lives and Fictions,” at Dartmouth College.
2019: THE PROPULSIVE AUGENBLICK OF HOPE: ANNEMARIE SCHWARZENBACH’S EINE FRAU ZU SEHEN AND THE UTOPICS OF QUEER FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN THE LATE WEIMAR REPUBLIC
Presented at the 2019 German Studies Association Convention for the panel “Modern Women in a World of Possibilities.”
2019: MARIELUISE FLEIßER’S NARRATIVE DOUBLINGS & THE POLITICS OF ‘FEMININE’ NARRATION IN THE LATE WEIMAR REPUBLIC
Presented at the 2019 Midwest Modern Language Association Convention for the panel “Transgressing Gender Ideals in German Women’s Writing.”
2018: WHO AND WHERE IS “MODERN”? MARIELUISE FLEISSER’S EINE ZIERDE FÜR DEN VEREIN AND THE UNGLEICHZEITIGKEITEN OF GENDERED SUBJECTIVITY
Presented at the 2018 German Studies Association Conference as a participant in the seminar “Weimar Culture Revisited.”
2017: “ICH GLAUBE AN DIESE WELT”: KLAUS MANN’S DER FROMME TANZ AND QUEER HISTORICITY
Presented at the 2017 German Studies Association Conference for the panel “Sexuality and Time in the Weimar Republic and Beyond.”
2016: “EIN ZUSTAND DER LOSGELÖSTHEIT”: SIEGFRIED KRACAUER’S THEORIES OF SUBJECTIVITY IN GEORG
Presented at the 2016 graduate student conference “The Aesthetics of Dissonance” at Yale University, hosted by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.