About

I completed a BA in German and Spanish and an MPhil in European Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge, where I stayed to pursue doctoral research on the representation of women and National Socialism in post-1945 women's writing. In addition, I spent some time teaching first-year translation courses at King's College London.

After completing my PhD in 2014, I spent three years at Maynooth University in Ireland. From 2014-2015, I was a postdoctoral researcher for the project "The Cultural Transmission of Motherhood in Europe: A Case Study" (funded by the Irish Research Council) and looked, in particular, at how mothers and parenting are represented on German television. I then embarked on a two-year Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship to develop my research on the representation of wartime sexual violence in contemporary German literature. I also had the opportunity to contribute to a wide range of modules on German language and literature.

Research interests

I am currently developing a larger research project on the cultural memory of wartime rape in post-1945 Germany, which will draw on theories of affect in order to investigate how the reception of difficult histories shifts over time and, ultimately, to illuminate how societies produce knowledge about individual and collective trauma.

In addition, I continue to engage with the representation of women in the Third Reich, especially those women at the heart of the regime and the concentrationary system. I am especially interested in the uses and usefulness of gender as a "category of historical analysis" (to quote Joan W. Scott) in recent research on female perpetrators and on the representation of such women in literature and film.

Further interests encapsulate all aspects of contemporary gender politics in Germany, with a particular focus on discourses surrounding maternal regret.

I am currently co-supervising a PhD on "Changing Spaces for Women’s Voices in Oral Histories of Holocaust and Genocide, 1945-2018" with colleagues at the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. I would be delighted to work with postgraduate students interested in German memory culture (especially regarding the Third Reich and World War II, as well as aspects of gender history), women's writing, and contemporary gender issues in the German-speaking world, including motherhood. I am also interested in the history and memory of conflict-related sexual violence more broadly and in the relationship between memorial art and the institutional frameworks of memory and activism.

Publications

Books

• Women and National Socialism in Postwar German Literature: Gender, Memory, and Subjectivity (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2017).

Special Issues

• "International Cultural Responses to Wartime Rape," Violence against Women 25:13 (October 2019).

Articles

• with Valerie Heffernan. "#regrettingmotherhood in Germany: Feminism, Motherhood, and Culture," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46:2 (2021): 337-360.
• "Guest Editor's Introduction," Violence against Women 25:13 (2019): 1515-1521.
• "The Right (Way) to Represent: The Emotional Politics of Remembering Mass Rape in Germany After 1945," Violence against Women 25:13 (2019): 1522–1542.
• "Writing Rape, Troping History: Story, Plot, and Ethical Reading in Julia Franck's Die Mittagsfrau (2007)," The German Quarterly, 91.2 (2018), 153-69. https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12065.
• "The Mass Rapes of 1945 in Contemporary Memory Culture: The (Gender) Politics of Metaphor and Metonymy," European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21.6 (2018), 707-23. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549417718207.

• "Comic Revisions? Motherhood and Comedy in Contemporary Germany," Feminist Media Studies, 16.6 (2016), 1014-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1178159.
• "Sympathy, Empathy and Postmemory: Problematic Positions in Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter," Modern Language Review, 111.2 (April 2016), 454-77. https://doi.org/10.5699/modelangrevi.111.2.0454.
• "‘Marxism, Gender, and Mediating the Memory of National Socialism: The Paradoxical Case of Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster (1976)," German Life and Letters, 67.2 (April 2014), 202-18. https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12039.

Chapters in Books

• "Projecting Violence Elsewhere: Remembering Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Cold War Germany," in Violence Elsewhere: Imagining Violence outside Germany since 1945, edited by Claire Bielby and Mererid Puw-Davies (Rochester, NY: Camden House, Forthcoming).
• with Roger Woods, "Autobiography as Testimony," in The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture, edited by Sara Jones and Roger Woods (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), pp. 159-183.
• "#MeToo and Wartime Rape: Looking Back and Moving Forward," in #MeToo in Germany: Rape Cultures and Resistance, 1770-2020, edited by Elisabeth Krimmer and Patty Simpson (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2022), pp. 197-216.
• with Valerie Heffernan, "International Responses to Regretting Motherhood," in Women's Lived Experiences of the Gender Gap: Gender Inequalities from Multiple Global Perspectives, edited by Angela Fitzgerald (Cham: Springer, 2021), pp. 121-133. Available open access.
• "History, Memory, and Making Sense of Motherhood in Twenty-First Century Germany: Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper (2003)," in Motherhood in Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Europe, edited by Victoria Browne, Adalgisa Giorgio, Emily Jeremiah, Abigail Lee Six, and Gill Rye (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 124-36.
• "The Pitfalls of Constructing a Female Genealogy: Cultural Memory of National Socialism in Recent Family Narratives," in German Women’s Writing in the 21st Century, edited by Hester Baer and Alexandra Merley Hill (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015), pp. 54-73.

Professional Service