Post-doc, American Studies

- Transnationalism and Cultural Exchange
- Theater and Performance Cultures
- Early American Literature
- Affect and Public Feeling
- Cultures of Difference
- Queer and Sexuality Studies

My current book project, “Revolutionary Laughter: Humor and the Public Sphere in Late-Eighteenth-Century America,” examines the relationship of literary humor and the political public sphere in revolutionary America. The project seeks to complicate prevalent Habermasian assumptions about the rationality and accessibility of public discourse in early America, and examines how humor was used to advance and legitimize structural exclusions from the political public sphere. The project also assesses the role humor played in the development of national and/or transatlantic literary aesthetics in late-eighteenth-century America.

Together with Verena Holztrattner, Ralph J. Poole, and Michael Streif, I am also currently co-editing a volume on "Gender and Comedy in the Age of the American Revolution."

- Secretary and Board Member, Austrian Association for American Studies (2017-18)
- DFG Network “Cultural Performance in Transnational American Studies” (2015-18)

Dr. phil. (University of Vienna, 2015): “Performing America Abroad: The Politics of Transnationalism in the Age of Neoliberal Difference”
- awarded “Fulbright Prize in American Studies” (2016)
- honored as runner-up for the “Obama Dissertation Prize” (2017)

Mag. phil. (University of Vienna, 2009): “Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America”


2015 - 2018, Research fellow, FWF project “Gender and Comedy in the Age of the American Revolution,” University of Salzburg
2011 - 2015, University assistant prae-doc, American Studies, University of Graz
2010 - 2011, University assistant prae-doc, English and American Studies, University of Vienna