I am Assistant Professor of German and a faculty member of the Interdisciplinary Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. In both my teaching and research, I work to cross the fields of literary and applied linguistic study, specializing in linguistic and discourse analytic approaches to literature, 20th- and 21st-century German literature, autobiographical theory, foreign language pedagogy and literacy, and applied linguistics. In particular I am interested in language, especially literary language, as a site of struggle for social power and the investigation of how meanings and access to certain practices are regulated and controlled.
In my current book project, I look at the abundance of autobiographically-based literary works appearing in German-speaking countries during the latter part of the twentieth century in relation to issues of recognition and representation and examine the various textual effects that drive the production and reception of these works.
I am also currently co-authoring an article for an upcoming volume of the journal of the American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators on Critical and Intercultural Theory and Language Pedagogy with my colleague and friend David Gramling, from the University of Bilkent, Turkey. In this article we contribute to current curricular and programmatic models of upper-division foreign language teaching in the U.S., by suggesting a Bourdieu-inspired approach to literature as linguistic practice, which addresses both the cultural studies and language acquisition goals of these advanced levels.
