In order to analyze political processes in the field of literary and cultural production, my master’s thesis (Peter Lang, 2000) and my dissertation (Winter, 2007) were anchored in Visual Culture Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Memory Studies, as well as informed by scholarship in transnationalism.
From Sites of Memory to Cybersights: (Re)Framing Japanese American Experiences (2007) was awarded the Dr. Katharina Sailer Foundation’s prize and the dissertation award of the Bavarian-American Academy (BAA). This transdisciplinary study explores the twentieth- and twenty-first-century legacies of Japanese American World War II internment experiences and the factors influencing the construction and mediation of ethnic and national identities in the United States.
It addresses contested memory and shows how once repressed historical events are selectively commemorated or even erased. The study surveys sites of memory ranging from historic places of Japanese American internment to memorials in downtown San Jose, downtown Los Angeles, and on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It also critically approaches sites, or rather sights, in cyberspace that may be visited only virtually, thereby taking the scholarship of American cultural history into the digital realm.
Exploring the nexus of British and American literature, hemispheric and Atlantic studies, and the medical humanities, Yellow Fever Years (my Habilitationsschrift) examines the interdisciplinary interfaces between disease, as an inherently transnational phenomenon, and American literatures of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
It traces the appropriation of yellow fever in legitimizing the young American nation and its embeddedness in discourses of race and gender from the late eighteenth until the end of the nineteenth century. With the help of digital tools, previously untapped textual and visual archives provided a heterogeneous base of canonical as well as previously disregarded works from the Caribbean and Atlantic world, analyzed for yellow fever’s metaphorical and actual potential of risk and crisis.
As a literary history of yellow fever epidemics, the book establishes the ideological, socio-political, visual, and cultural processing of the disease, which figures as an invasive and inexplicable Other. It also highlights the continuing relevance of nineteenth-century yellow fever texts and their transformation as part of a larger storehouse of cultural disease memory.
With regard to the cultural and visual productivity of disease, Yellow Fever Years provides the typological groundwork for a broader hemispheric approach connecting perspectives and communities of the Caribbean, North America, including Canada, Central and South America, the British Isles, and the west coast of Africa.
My other research projects and resulting publications are in the fields of Gender Studies, Environmental Studies, and Contemporary Art, with a particular emphasis on documentary photography and virtual and augmented reality art. In collaboration with Dr. Susanne Leikam, I investigated the visual repertoires of calamities in U.S.-American media cultures from the late nineteenth century until today.
For my research project, Biopolitics in Transnational American History and Culture, for which I served as an ARS program fellow (Academic Research Sabbatical, University of Regensburg), I developed work on real, metaphorical, and imagined threats and the biopolitical power structures connected to them.
The aim of the project is to disentangle these threats and to examine how they feed into a double helix of perceived risk and illusory security. Images, including film, video, photography, and social media, shape the way we perceive the world. They have become forms of thought that generate new kinds of knowledge based on visual communication. This work therefore also asks which tools and methods are needed to decipher these processes.
In addition to contributing to American literary and cultural studies, the project seeks to make its findings applicable within the environmental and medical humanities. It is also anchored in my previous work on The United States and the Question of Rights, which resulted in a publication on the Ebola virus and read photography as an instrument of biopolitical injustice.
Parallel to the work on my Habilitationsschrift, I drew on my previous research in cultural history and memory studies to pursue a project on the aesthetics of transnational 9/11 memorials.
My study, The Aesthetics of Remembering 9/11: Toward a Transnational Typology of Memorials, published in the Journal of Transnational American Studies in 2015, led to the creation of an internet-based encyclopedia of 9/11 monuments based on geolocative principles.
The website allows researchers and the interested public to pursue new questions within the framework of transnationally oriented scholarship. The project was carried out with Prof. Erika Doss, University of Notre Dame, and supported by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University.
As a co-founder and executive member of the Digital American Studies initiative (DASI) within the German Association for American Studies (GAAS/DGfA), I closely follow the development and dissemination of new forms of publication, particularly in the context of open access and open science. In addition to critically assessing the productivity of Digital Humanities approaches, DASI investigates digital methods and tools for American Studies, as well as the digital as a cultural formation in its own right.
Since 2022, our group also examines the growing role of artificial intelligence, especially large language models, in research and higher education. While these systems open up new possibilities for knowledge production and dissemination, they also require sustained critical scrutiny. Current models remain prone to factual inaccuracies and hallucinations, raising fundamental questions about reliability, epistemic authority, and scholarly standards.
One of our central concerns is the changing role of the university within the knowledge society. This includes a critical re-perspectivization of the skills traditionally associated with higher education. Core competencies of American studies scholarship such as analysis, synthesis, and domain expertise are reassessed in light of AI-assisted knowledge production: to what extent do they remain central, and how do their conditions of relevance change? At the same time, the project addresses the future of cultural literacy in an environment marked by decreasing tolerance for intellectual friction.
Finally, the project seeks to identify and develop productive models for teaching and research in the age of AI, with a focus on integrating technological tools without relinquishing critical judgment, intellectual independence, and disciplinary depth.