I am a writer and an ecocritical literary and media scholar. My research explores contemporary environmental culture from a cognitive  perspective with a particular focus on affect and emotion. I have a special interest in climate change and disaster risk communication and narrativization, eco-documentaries, and food narratives.

After several years in the German film and television industry as production manager and later scriptwriter, I earned my PhD in Literature at the University of California, San Diego in 2008. Four years as postdoc researcher at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland prepared me for my move to Austria, where I am Associate Professor of American Studies in the English Department at the University of Klagenfurt.

My growing interest in the public environmental humanities has led me to initiate and direct the inter- and transdisciplinary research project “Visions of Sustainability: Documentaries as Impulses for Societal Transformation” (2024-2026) based at the Sustainability Innovation Campus (University of Freiburg & Karlsruhe Institute of Technology).

I am also working as a risk communication expert for the Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (DG ECHO) of the European Commission, giving keynotes and facilitating Masterclasses for European policy makers and contributing to a new initiative to address current challenges in disaster risk communication.

Moreover, I am currently a researcher on the project “Cinema and Environment 2” (2025-2028), directed by Katarzyna Paszkiewicz at the University of the Balearic Islands. I was also a researcher on the original project, “Cinema and Environment: Affective Ecologies in the Anthropocene” (2020-2024), which the current project builds on.

From 2014 to 2015, I was a Visiting Researcher in the English Department at UCLA with support from the Swiss National Science Foundation. I was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the University of Munich from 2010-2011, where I established and curated the Green Visions Documentary Film Series.

My academic book publications include Cosmopolitan Minds: Literature, Emotion, and the Transnational Imagination (University of Texas Press, 2014), Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion and Environmental Narrative (Ohio State University Press, 2017), and Growing Hope: Narratives of Food Justice (Cambridge UP, 2025). I am the editor of Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014) and the co-editor (with Sylvia Mayer) of The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (Winter, 2014). With Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and W.P. Malecki, I edited a cluster of articles on Empirical Ecocriticism in Interdisciplinary Studies in Litrature and Environment (2020). A co-edited book related to my FWF project, Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology, was published by Routledge in 2022, and, with Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, W.P. Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder, I edited a volume, Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). My articles have been published in forums including Poetics Today, Style, ISLE, Environmental Humanities, Environmental Communication, Green Letters, African American Review, MELUS, Textual Practice, English Studies, Style, and Utopian Studies. More information on my academic publications is available here.

After a twenty-year hiatus from creative writing, I have returned to it in recent years with a few short stories and a novel, Fragile (Elzwhere 2023).

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Photo Credits: The majority of the photographs on this website are either taken by me or the work of Boris Bugla, a filmmaker and photographer based in Germany. The photograph of the river landscape on the “Visions of Sustainability” page was taken by Neil Ever Osborne, a photo journalist and media scholar based in Canada. The above portrait was taken by Katharina Tischler-Banfield. My great thanks goes to all three photographers for allowing me to use their beautiful work.

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