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 stylistic and discourse analytic approaches to literature, 20th- and 21st-century German literature, foreign language pedagogy and literacy, and the teaching of culture. In particular I am interested in language, and especially literary language, use, as social sites of struggle over meanings and subjectivities, and in aesthetic and affective dimensions of reading practices. I have published in the fields of German Studies, applied linguistics, language pedagogy and stylistics. A complete list of my publications can be found here.
In my current book project, titled "The Pragmatics of Literary Testimony: Authenticity in German Social Autobiography" (under contract with Routledge), I examine a number of German-language literary autobiographies that are connected to diverse social movements of the last forty years. These books have all received critical attention from the popular press, topped bestseller lists, and have been pivotal in discussions of representation, subjectivity, and referentiality. Because of the thematic diversity of these works, scholars within literary and cultural studies have tended to treat them separately under topical categories, such as women’s literature, the post-war generation, migration and multiculturalism, etc. Underlying my analysis is the belief that the perceived authenticity of autobiographical acts is as much a matter of textuality as it is of topicality i.e., how language means, rather than what it means. For this reason, I develop in the book an integrative stylistics approach, which draws from discourse analysis, pragmatics, cognitive poetics, and sociolinguistics, in order to describe the textual effects that drive the production and reception of these works as authentic. Authenticity here is understood as the aggregate sense of realism, immediacy, exemplarity, genuineness, and social relevance that we associate with a legitimate and worthwhile literary testimony.
My colleagues David Gramling, Aslı Iğsız and I have recently received a generous Collaboration and Innovation Grant from the UofA’s newly founded Confluence: A Center for Creative Inquiry, in order to embark on a new research endeavor entitled “Multilingual, 2.0?”. For more information see here - Multilingual 2.0? - or contact me directly.
I am also currently leading an innovative pedagogies project Hypermedia Texts: Using Multimodal Text Annotations to Promote Cultural Literacy with the Center for Edcuational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL). This project seeks to address the difficulties of teaching language as culture by using hypermedia annotation to decentering cultural background information provided to the students. My collaborators and I will create culturally annotated hypermedia texts in Arabic, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Turkish as well as pedagogical materials to accompany them with the goal of developing new pedagogies for the teaching of language as culture through literary texts.
