I’m a writer and academic working at the intersection of literature, knowledge production, and public discourse. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology, I explore how meaning is generated through cultural and scholarly practices, how normative orders are embedded in texts, and how literature and academic discourse shape democratic publics.
My work combines interpretive methods with institutional analysis, drawing on resonance theory, cultural sociology, and critical social theory. I often focus on authorship—not just as a professional role, but as a cultural form that reflects and shapes values, knowledge, and social structures. I’m especially interested in the aesthetic articulation of critique and in literature as a site of social self-observation. At present, my scholarship examines the normative foundations of resonance theory through the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer, and I develop a comparative critique of civil sphere theory and Habermasian deliberative democracy.
My book Authorship and Publishing in the Humanities (Cambridge University Press, 2023), based on my doctoral thesis, examines the symbolic and institutional frameworks that shape scholarly authorship in the humanities. In addition, I have worked on projects relating to research evaluation, open access, and research cultures in Germany and the UK, with a particular focus on discourses in the humanities. Most recently, I have written on the sociological reception of poetry (using the example of Tomas Tranströmer), as well as on literary authorship as an actor in civil society (explored through the case of Colson Whitehead).
Together, these projects form the foundation of a research trajectory that aims to systematically relate social theory to articulations in cultural forms. In future work, I plan to extend this approach—for instance, in relation to the discourse on the Anthropocene and the critique of anthropocentric world-relations in the context of climate change. Initial reflections on this can be found in an essay on George R. Stewart’s Fire, in which I analyse nature and ecological catastrophe as culturally mediated, narratively structured experiences. Building on this approach, I consider literary texts and its symbolic forms to be fruitful sites of social self-observation—particularly in moments where issues of nature, responsibility, and transformation are at stake. My objective is to establish new links between social theory, normative critique, and cultural practice.
Literature and Academic Work in Conversation
I also write literary fiction and poetry myself. Choose below to find out more about my academic or literary work:
You can find an overview of my scholarly work as well as a small selection of my literary work on this website. The scholarly work is mostly in English, the novel and poems are in German. You can find the privacy policy here.
You can also find a selection of typographic portraits of writers. An ongoing project, just for fun:
