Research

After completing my doctoral studies, I held lectureships at various Oxford colleges before spending a year as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Università degli Studi di Verona. I have returned to Oxford to take up my current post as Montgomery Fellow in German Literature. My doctoral thesis was concerned with the Early Romantic poet and philosopher Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806), and how close attention to her poems, plays, and prose reveals her metaphysical commitments to Spinozist pantheism - the idea that God and the world are the same. One of the primary aims of my thesis was to establish Günderrode a significant intellectual and literary figure alongside the better known Jena circle of Frühromantiker (e.g. Novalis, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel). My doctoral thesis was awarded the inaugural Klaus Heyne-Preis zur Erforschung der deutschen Romantik (Klaus Heyne Award for Research in German Romanticism) from the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main in 2021 and was the joint first-place winner of the Novalis-Preis from the Internationale Novalis-Gesellschaft (International Novalis Society) and the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in 2022. A revised version of the thesis has been published with Legenda and the Modern Humanities Research Association, entitled Karoline von Günderrode: Philosophical Romantic.

I'm broadly interested in the literature, philosophy, intellectual history, and their intersections with science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am currently developing a research interest in the interaction between literature and science from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, as well as a project on how to write an alternative history of German literature of the Goethezeit, looking at how literature is made by a variety of actors - writers, editors, publishers, and readers. 

Teaching

I teach modern literature and translation on the undergraduate course: Papers II, III, and IV on the Prelims course; for FHS, Paper VIII options from the eighteenth century to twentieth century; eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century options for Paper X, as well as Paper II (unseen translation). 

Publications

Book

Karoline von Günderrode: Philosophical Romantic (Cambridge: Legenda, 2022) 

Reviews: The German Quarterly 96.2 (2023), 287-289; Symphilosophie 5 (2023), 460-466; MLN 138.3 (2023), 1248-1252; European Romantic Review 35.1 (2024), 159-165; Goethe Yearbook 31 (2024), 182-185; Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 74.2 (2024), 251-253; Seminar 60.3 (2024), 262-264.

Book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals

'„Denken ist Graben, und mit einem Senkbley mäßen“: Dialogische Aphoristik als Denkform bei Rahel Levin Varnhagen', Romantische Philosophie. Vertreter – Positionen – Themen, Matthis Glatzel, Dajana Daum (eds.) (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2024), 177-201.

'Symptomatic Readers and the Sentimental Novel', Publications of the English Goethe Society 93.1 (2024), 83-98.

'„Ich will aus der Vergangenheit einige zerstobene Splitter deines Geistes auffassen“: Der Briefwechsel zwischen Karoline und Charlotte von Günderrode', Noch Zukunft haben. Zum Werk Karoline von Günderrodes, Frederike Middelhoff, Martina Wernli (eds.) (Berlin: Metzler, 2024), 205-71.

'Religiöse Erneuerung bei Günderrode', Noch Zukunft haben. Zum Werk Karoline von Günderrodes, Frederike Middelhoff, Martina Wernli (eds.) (Berlin: Metzler, 2024), 89-106.

'Fichtes Bestimmung des Menschen und die Rhetorik des Transzendentalismus', Rhetorik. Ein internationales Jahrbuch (2023), 87-98.

'The Politics of Romanticism: Novalis and the White Rose', Oxford German Studies 52.1 (May 2023), 48-61.

'Daimonic Energies in Hölderlin's Tod des Empedokles', Forces of Nature. Dynamism and Agency in German Romanticism, Frederike Middelhoff, Adrian Renner (eds.) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022), 127-46.

'Race and Colonialism around 1800: Herder, Fischer, Kleist', Publications of the English Goethe Society 91.2 (June 2022), 140-56.

'Lebenskraft', Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts 1.2 (November 2021), https://goethe-lexicon.pitt.edu/GL/article/view/45 

‘“Diese Unwissenheit ist mir der unerträglichste Mangel, der gröste Widerspruch”:  The Pursuit of Pre-rational Knowledge in Günderrode’, Anti\Idealism: Re-Interpreting a German Discourse, Gert Hofmann, Juliana de Albuquerque (eds.) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 131-45.

'Performativity and "Poetic" Epistemology: Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten's Response to Moses Mendelssohn's Aesthetics', Edinburgh German Yearbook 12: Re-Populating the Eighteenth Century: Second-Tier Writing in the German Enlightenment, Johannes Birgfeld, Michael Wood (eds.) (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018), 213-30.

'"Und monarchie ist beßer als anarchie, und Aristokratie, und Kannaillearchie – den daß ists jezt": Ein neu entdeckter Brief Therese Hubers und Georg Forsters an Georgine Heyne', Georg-Forster-Studien 21 (2018), 91-104.