About me
As literary scholar, interdisciplinary researcher and lecturer in Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Potsdam (Associate Professor, 2015–2023), the Leibniz-University of Hannover (Chair-representative, 2023/24) and the University of Rostock (Chair-representative 2023) I have worked for many years on the relations between Life Sciences and Popular Science Communication in comparison to fictional literature about scientific knowledge as well as Narrative Medicine and Life Writing with special interest on Fictions and Narratives of Vulnerability, Suffering, and Convalescence. All of these topics are published in different scientific monographs.
Within this broader field I focused and specialized my research skills in Comparative Motherhood Studies, Transhistorical Concepts of Modern Masculinities as well as Transnational Feminism and Global History of Femicide that I am developing in my lectures and seminars especially regarding Latin American Cultures and Literatures.
Currently I am preparing two edited volumes on the "Vulnerability of Pregnant Bodies and Motherhood from Ancient Times to the Modern World" (Routledge Cultural History Series, 2025) in cooperation with Davina Höll (University of Tübingen) and "Greek Bodies on the Move: Performing and Representing the Male Greek Body in the Western World through the Ages" (Palgrave, 2025/26) with my co-editors Prof. Dr. Filippo Carlà-Uhink (University of Potsdam) and Prof. Dr. Florian Freitag (University Duisburg-Essen).
PhD thesis, 2011-2015
With a scholarship from the German Research Foundation (DFG) I completed my PhD thesis in the Research Training Group “Lebensformen & Lebenswissen” with a topic on the theory and history of Life Sciences, the Popular Science Communication and fictional narratives of Science and Medicine. From a comparative view of languages and cultures (Germany, France, England, USA, Latin America) I analyzed texts from the history of science (Genetics, Epigenetics, Sociobiology, Evolutionary Biology and Psychology) and its communication strategies within and beyond the academic field as well as in comparison to their fictional recreation in literatures of the 20th Century and in contemporary novels of the 21st Century.
Habilitation thesis, 2016-2022
During my academic position as associated professor at the Institute for Romance Literatures and Culture (University of Potsdam, 2015-2023), I delved into the interdisciplinary historical research work on the "figura"-concept based on the literary theory of Erich Auerbach. The result is a comparative philological study about the interdisciplinary history of concepts in constellations between Theology, Philosophy, Literature, Natural History as well as Art History from antiquity to modernity, rich in cross-references between Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German and English speaking texts.
Starting with Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, the monograph traces "figura" in comparative constellations to develope a new philosophical method called "figuralogy" which I call in my next book forthcoming "figural universalism".
Thus, "Ecce figura" is a compendium of interdisciplinary conceptual history between literature, philosophy and theology, which invites the reader to expand the offered theory in new constellations.
