My research is concerned with German-language literature and film, and cultural theory and philosophy from around the world since 1800. I focus on topics of surveillance and complicity in modern German and comparative culture, and on theories of the archive, subjectivity and collectivity.

 

My book After the Stasi was published in October 2015 by Bloomsbury. The book combines close readings of literary works by victims and spies from former East Germany with extracts from the Stasi files. In writing the book, I drew on insights from key works of literary modernism and from cultural theories of the self, surveillance and sovereignty in order to explore the culture of collaboration that existed both in the GDR and in its aftermath.

 

I have published articles and essays on resistance in French women’s writing after 1968, on the critical spectatorship of pornography in Elfriede Jelinek's novel Die Klavierspielerin and Michael Haneke’s film of the novel, on archive theory, and on Kafka and pleasure. I am currently working on a project about surveillance and complicity in German-language cinema, and the first publication to emerge from this project is an essay on Harun Farocki’s use of moving image archives to uncover the hidden complicities on which late capitalism relies.

 

I am Co-Investigator of the research project ‘Uncertain Archives’, which is funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research. The purpose of this project is to adapt cultural theories of the archive in order to understand the risks and potentials of big data. I am also Co-Investigator of the German Screen Studies Network, which has funding from the German Academic Exchange Service and aims to provide an international network, symposium and showcase for German-language film.