About

I am a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in English Literature and British Cultural Studies at the Cluster of Excellence “Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies” at the University of Bonn (Germany), where I research and teach on slavery’s global entanglements in the black Atlantic world and beyond. I am currently working on a second book project which intertwines forms and media of black life writing with 18th and 19th-century ecologies.

In my research and teaching I am particularly interested in relating literary texts and various strategies of imagination to other cultural as well as socio-political formations. My research interests span from the 18th to the 21st century.

In my PhD research, published as Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Worlds (2021) with Palgrave’s series on Contemporary Women’s Writing, I explored contemporary literature, culture and new media forms in interplay with feminist and postcolonial Anglophone perspectives. Analyzing the vulnerable, private spheres of love and desire inhabited by black, queer and female characters, while simultaneously grappling with geo-political issues such as neo-colonialism, the so-called refugee crisis and diasporic displacement in a globalized twenty-first-century world, the project proposed a wilful re-negotiation of ostensible oppositions such as public/private, global/intimate.

In my book and my other publications, my research foregrounds literature’s ability to engage with the harmful as well as the reparative results that come to be produced at the intersections of affect, migration and globalization, and activates various African diasporic literatures in concert with one another, thus suggesting a newly connected global imaginary.

My research on geographies and spatial practices of (dis)location has evolved into an interest in ecological and ecocritical modes, which I am currently developing as part of my postdoctoral research. In my postdoctoral project I look at late 18th- and early 19th-century forms of black life writing (i.e. slave narratives, autobiographies, letters, treaties) and connect them with ecologies of Empire from an ecocritical perspective. I am interested in the contested constellations of environment, nature and ecology in early examples of black life writing and how these texts reflect on the entanglements of black and colonial ecologies in, of and after the Plantationocene, while expanding and recasting our understanding of the constitutive and contingent relationships between the Black Atlantic world, ecological belonging and capitalist modernity.

I completed an MA (Magister) in English, Comparative, and American Literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and King’s College London with a thesis on the (de)construction of postcolonial female voice and identity in neo-Victorian, postmodern narratives.

I was then employed at the Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg where I wrote my PhD dissertation while convening numerous graduate and undergraduate modules on postcolonial and diaspora literature and theory, gender and feminism, and English Literature and British Cultural Studies from the 19th century to the present.

At JMU I organized various international conferences, summer schools and public readings, and coordinated the department’s tutorials for English Literature and British Cultural Studies. I also worked on the 5-year DAAD/IGP-funded project “Literature in a Globalized World: Creative and Critical Perspectives”, a project in cooperation with Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India.