Education
PhD, The University of Texas at Austin
MA, Texas Tech University
Staatsexamen, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany
MA, Indiana University
Academic Interests
History of German cinema, transnational cinema, film sound, 20th/21st century German literature and culture, minority studies, diaspora studies, European studies
Teaching
Courses:
First- and second-year German
Gender, Sex, and Ethnicity in German Cinema: A Survey
From Berlin to Hollywood: German Cinema and Its Impact on Hollywood Films, 1920s-1960s (St Lawrence U)
The Movies Go to War (U of Texas at Austin)
Introduction to European Studies (U of Texas at Austin)
Independent studies:
Weimar Culture in Art and Cinema (St Lawrence U)
The History of German Cinema (St Lawrence U)
German Economy: 1918-1955 (St Lawrence U)
Research
I am working on the first (English language) monograph on Fatih Akın and his cinema, (tentatively entitled) The New Sound of Europe: Polyphony and Multiethnicity in Fatih Akın's Cinema. Focusing on Akın's distinctive visions of regional and local aspects in Europe, I argue that his cosmopolitan films challenge existing notions of Europe and Europeanness. With his aesthetics of heterogeneity–as I call it–Akın's cinematic Europe questions particularly notions of a clear-cut and national Europe. One of the major innovations of Akın's cinema is his subtle exhibit of changing sounds of Europe. This cinematic Europe threatens, in particular, fantasies of homogeneity and monolingualism.
This study also includes an analysis of a larger European context by juxtaposing Akın's use of cinematic space, language, and music to other European directors such as Mathieu Kassovitz, Yamina Benguigui, Michael Haneke, and Stephen Frears, whose films display aspects of transnational cinema. I argue that minority filmmakers such as Akın or Benguigui, but also filmmakers who are commonly not solely associated with minority cinema such as Frears, Haneke, and Kassovitz display a multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan Europe that disseminates images and sounds of a fundamentally changed Europe, a Europe which exists and operates well beyond the borders of "Fortress Europe."
