Research:

I am Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Junior Research Fellow at New College.

My work bridges the Medical and Environmental Humanities by exploring the dynamics between human physical abilities (habit and skill) and the ecologies that they familiarize and shape. My interdisciplinary research draws on German and European modernist literature, philosophy, and dance, and is in dialogue with wider questions in the philosophy of embodiment.

I am the author of Habituation in German Modernism, which explores how writers imagined the ways in which we adapt to new and/or unfamiliar environments. It brings German literature and thought of the early twentieth century – a time of immense social and material change in Europe – into dialogue with current research in the cognitive sciences. A more personal reflection on the book can be found in this blogpost on the publisher's website.

My current research project Dancing Modernist Literature is funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. This project explores 21st-century dance adaptations of modernist literature and what these adaptations tell us about the continuing relevance of these modernist texts, imagining anew their concerns around sexuality, disability, aging, and gender through the body. The book based on this project is under contract with Edinburgh University Press.

I am series editor of Brill's Bodies & Abilities in Culture, Literature, and the Arts and co-curator of Kafka: Making of an Icon, a major exhibition at the Weston Library in Oxford and the Morgan Library in New York. I am also an associate researcher on the AHRC-funded Kafka's Transformative Communities Project (PI: Carolin Duttlinger). 

As part of the Kafka's Transformative Communities Project and my Leverhulme Project, I hold two grants -- one from the New College Ludwig Fund (PI) and the other from the TORCH Knowledge Exchange Innovation Fund (Co-I; with PI Barry Murnane) -- for a collaboration on a new dance adaptation of Kafka's 'A Hunger Artist' by choreographer Arthur Pita, starring former Royal Ballet principal Edward Watson and cabaret artists Meow Meow.

I am a former professional ballet dancer, choreographer, and teacher. I have danced leading roles in such ballets as The Nutcracker, A Streetcar Named Desire, Romeo and Juliet, Le Spectre de la Rose, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Teaching:

At Oxford, I have taught Paper X on Franz Kafka, Paper II in the FHS, and the prelims poetry paper, having previously taught a broad range of subjects at Amsterdam University College and Utrecht University. I have supervised various theses at both BA- and MA-level on topics in German Literature, Cognitive Literary Studies, and Dance.

Selected Publications:

‘Kafka as Literature of the Absurd.’ In The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature, ed. Michael Y. Bennett (London: Routledge): 53-62

With Katrin Kohl. ‘Manuscript Journeys.' In Kafka: Making of an Icon, ed. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing): 117-35.

'Benjamin in i10: Journalistic Networks, Exchange, and Reception behind a Dutch, Multi-Lingual, Avant-Garde Magazine,' in 'Der Journalist als Produzent: Walter Benjamins publizistische Texte und die Medienlandschaft der Zwischenkriegszeit,' eds. Carolin Duttlinger and Daniel Weidner, special issue, Monatshefte, 115.2 (2023): 189-203.

‘“One Must Know How to Dance”: Vicki Baum’s Menschen im Hotel (1929), Edmund Goulding’s Grand Hotel (1932), and a Choreography of Social Responses’, in ‘Transatlantic Cognitive Cultures’, edited by Shannon McBriar and Meindert E. Peters, special issue, Symbiosis, 25.2 (2021), 213-233.