I teach at all levels on the German, Comparative Literature and Culture, and International Film/Film Studies programmes at Royal Holloway.
I am a specialist in modern German and Austrian culture with a particular interest in the Weimar Republic, the anti-Fascist exile and Nazi Germany. I also research the history of sport and cultural responses to sport and leisure in the German-speaking countries.
My first-year teaching includes a number of Comparative Literature and Culture and Film Studies courses including ML1101 International Film: Contexts and Practices, ML1102 The Birth of Film, and ML1204 Tales of the City: Introduction to Thematic Analysis. In the final year I teach GM3134 National Socialism and The Third Reich in German Film and Visual Culture from 1933 to the Present. Almost all of my teaching is comparative and interdisciplinary in nature.
I have a particular interest in the work of the Austrian novelist and journalist Joseph Roth (1894-1939), the subject of my 2006 monograph Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth's Writing in the 1920s, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 67 (Leeds: Maney, 2006) .
In 2017 I published an interdisciplinary monograph on the cultural, social and political significance of the legendary German boxer Max Schmeling (1905-2005): Max Schmeling and the Making of a National Hero in Twentieth-Century Germany (Palgrave Studies in Sport and Politics, 2017). In my current research I am investigating the representation of leisure in German literature and film.
My latest book is an illustrated study of the groundbreaking film Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930), which was published in the BFI Film Classics series published by Bloomsbury in March 2025.
My full research profile can be found here.
