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Statement on Graduate Student Advising

I am an Assistant Professor of German and my research and teaching interests range broadly from beguine mysticism of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to Afro- and Black German hip hop, poetry, and activism. I received my BA in German studies and History with a minor in Medieval studies from the University of Minnesota, as well as an MA in German/ Germanic Medieval studies. I completed my PhD in German from the University of California Berkeley in 2018. The core of my research is the question of identity and cultural production by marginalized voices from the medieval through current societies. My work is interdisciplinary—focusing on historical and philological methodologies as well as sociology and cultural anthropology—and crosses linguistic and modern national borders.

My current research focus is Black and Afro-German cultural production, poetics, worldbuilding, activism, and questions of identity performance and formulation. Central to my research is two concepts: 1) the ways in which Black-created works imagine new worlds through hip hop tracks, art installations, and other cultural production to dream new possible futures for society; 2) Black cultural production as a means of dual purpose communication, both within Afro- and Black German-speaking communities and across the Diaspora, that seeks to both name oneself and speak out against forms of systemic and institutional racism, discrimination, bigotry, etc. I am currently developing two monograph-length projects. 

• The first, tentatively titled A Playlist for Black Germany: Hapticity, Future Worlds, and Joy, which focuses on the focuses on cultural production by Black diasporic artists and scholars in German-speaking countries and the ways in which their process of creation opens up the possibility for imagining new worldviews while also attending to the lived reality in a world preoccupied with Black necropolitics. 
• The second project, Haunted Heimats: Reading Germany Otherwise, looks at the figure of the vampire and undead in German fiction read through the lens of Black radical theory and feminism to explore the ways in which fear of the Other and racialization have played out in the German cultural landscape since the premodern periods.

I am also working on the translation of the Resonanzen Schwarzes Literaturfestival: Eine Dokumentation (Spektor Books 2022) through funding from the President’s Fund for the Humanities.

As an avid consumer of pop culture, gamer, and graphic novel reader, gaming and storytelling (DnD/Pathfinder, LARPing, table top, etc.), I integrate aspects of gaming and storytelling into courses I develop, as well as research-based creative interpretation/ introspection of broad topics such as modernity, identity, and legacies of coloniality.

Publications:

Peer Reviewed Articles

“Imagining Otherwise: Wake Work in/as German studies.” MLN, Special Issue “German Studies Dossier on Decolonization,” vol. 138, no. 3, Apr. 2023, pp. 1189–1201,

“Feeling Beyond Words: Ineffability and Haptic Translational Praxis of Black German Writings.” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Special Issue “Centering Black Cultural Production in Translation,” vol. 47, no. 1, Jan. 2023,.

“Black German Poetic Ecologies: Joy and Diasporic Homecoming in Megaloh’s ‘Oyoyo’ and Leila Akinyi’s ‘Oyoyo // Nyumbani.’” The German Quarterly, Special Issue “Black German Studies,” vol. 95, no. 4, 2022, pp. 372–95. .

“The Queer Temporalities of Sadomasochism in Robert Musil’s Törless.” Monatshefte, Special Issue “Rupture, Slowness, Untimeliness: Queer Time and History in German Studies,” vol. 114, no. 3, Sept. 2022, pp. 384–406. mon.uwpress.org,.

Chapters in Edited Volumes

“A Question of Inclusion: Pedagogical Methods, Systematic Racism, and the US German Classroom” in Diversity and Decolonization of the German Curriculum, eds. Regine Criser and Erwin Malakaj. Palgrave Macmillian, 2020.

Translations

Sharon Dodua Otoo, “Love,” transl. by Adrienne Merritt, in Transit: Your Homeland is My Nightmare special issue, eds. Jon Cho-Polizzi and Michael Sandburg, Dec. 2021 () Reprinted as physical book with Literarische Diverse, 2022.

Blog Entries and Podcasts

“Teaching German and Germanic Languages in the Age of White Supremacy,” DDGC Blog, co-authored with Adam Oberlin, David Gramling and Maureen Gallagher, March 2021 ()

Publications in Progress

“The Haunting Poetics of May Ayim’s “die zeit danach” (1995) and Ada Diagne’s “Der Sturm” (2021).” Poetics Today 46:1, special issue “Time Loops, Temporal Uncertainty, and Problem-solving in Narrative” (Forthcoming January 2025). 

“Spectral Legacies: Decentering Germanness as Whiteness in the German Curriculum.” Chapter for Teaching German in the 21st Century. MLA Options for Teaching Series. (Forthcoming 2025).

“Soliloquy and Soundtrack: A Desire / Love �ʱ������������.” Thinking with Lauren Berlant edited volume, eds. Carrie Smith, Hester Baer, Ervin Malakaj, and Simone Stirner. 

“The Quietly Quotidian Call of Cthulhu.” Fascist Fantasies: Aesthetics and the Ambivalent Reception of Popular Fiction and Film in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Lever Press (Forthcoming 2025)

“Flirting with the Text: Black Queer Reading Practice and the Coquetry of Meaning.” Queer and Trans German Studies volume as part of a new book series with De Gruyter. 

"Stichwort: Leib / “Embodiment.” Die Gegenwärtigkeit der Courasche. Grimmelshausens Roman im Kontext aktueller Theoriedebatten. Eds. Daniela Fuhrmann (Universität Zürich) & Ervin Malakaj (University of British Columbia). University of Zürich Press. (Forthcoming 2024/25)

“Translation and Belacane’s Haunting Blackness in Wilhelm von Eschenbach’s Parzival.” Special Issue “Concepts of Race in Premodern German Studies” in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies. Projected publication December 2025.

“Lamenting Dido in Castlevania Nocturne.” Revision of PCA conference paper. Special Issue “Monsters and the Monstrous”, Journal of Popular Culture. Eds. U. Melissa Anyiwo, David Hansen, Amanda Jo Hobson, Colleen Karn, and Lisa Nevarez. (Forthcoming late 2025 / early 2026).