In my teaching, I am dedicated to creating an accessible and interactive learning environment that encourages students to become active participants in their own learning process. I believe that the study of literature and other media stimulates critical thinking because it offers us multiple voices and perspectives, intertextual and intermedial connections, and interracial, intercultural, or interspecies relations. Close reading and visual analysis are central to my teaching, which is informed not only by my research, but also by the years I worked in the film and television industry. Like all teachers, I also learn a lot from my students, and I greatly enjoy exploring issues, texts, and ideas together as a group. Since, as a researcher, I have a deep interest in reception, it is always fascinating for me to see how students respond to a given text, often in unexpected ways.
CLASSES
LECTURE CLASSES
American Culture: History and Society
Survey of Anglophone Literatures: Focus America
History of American Film
Introduction to Film Studies
Anglophone Cultures in Context (with René Schalleger)
Contested Nature: Film and Ecological Conflict (with Patrick Kupper)
SEMINARS
Visionen der Nachhaltigkeit: Der Klimawandel im Internationalen Dokumentarfilm
How Cultural Texts Make us Feel: Cognitive Media Theory and Emotion
It’s Not TV: The American ‘Quality” Drama Series
Growing Hope: Food Justice Narrative in den amerikanischen Medien
Intermediality
The Short Story
Friends of the Earth: Environmentalism in American Literature
Postmodern American Fiction
Muslim American Fictions
The American Screwball Comedy
American Film Noir
American Food Cultures
American Women Writers
Apocalypse Now? American Climate Change Cinema
Innocents Abroad: American Expatriate Writers
Utopia and Dystopia in American Culture
American Border Fictions
How Literature and Film Make Us Feel
Asian American Literature
American Ecocinema
The Storyworlds of Toni Morrison
The Storyworlds of Henry James
American Writers in Paris, 1920-1960
Screening Resistance: Film and Postcolonial Ecological Conflict
Adaptation: From Literature to Film
Native American Fiction(s)
Cosmopolitanism in American Literature and Culture
The Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age
Fictions of the (Im)possible: Utopia and Dystopia
Ecologies of Disaster: Un-Natural Catastrophes in American History, Culture, and Film (with Christof Mauch)
PROSEMINARS
American History through Film
American Culture and the Environment
Black Women Writers in the USA
Native American Fiction
The Postmodern American Novel
Contemporary American Film and the Environmental Crisis
Multi-Ethnic American Women Writers
19th-Century African American Literature: from Douglass to Chesnutt
Environmental Renaissance: American Romanticism and Ecology
African American Literature
Literary and Cultural Theory
Consumerism versus Ecology: American Culture in the 21st Century