Biography

I studied Comparative Literature, German Literature and History in Berlin, London, Paris and Cambridge. I worked as a teaching assistant in the German Department at the Free University Berlin and as a supervisor in the French Department of the University of Cambridge. In 2005/2006 I was a visiting researcher and research assistant at the European University Institute in Florence.
In my Ph.D. on “Vision and Photography in the Autobiographical Works of Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes”, which I completed in February 2007 at the University of Cambridge, I combine literary, cultural-historical and media-theoretical approaches to explore three main areas of enquiry: the historical modification of ways of seeing and their translation into visual and textual forms of representation; conceptions of subjectivity as inter-subjectivity; and the relationship between vision, autobiography and the emotions.
I have published on the conception of identity and alterity and on the relationship between visuality and emotion in Proust, and co-edited a book entitled Space: New Dimensions in French Studies. My essay “Proust’s Emotional Cavities: Vision and Affect in A la recherche du temps perdu” was awarded the R.H. Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize by the Society of French Studies.
In the spring of 2007 my son Antonin was born. Since taking up research again in September 2007 I have continued to explore the interface of visual perception and emotion as well as the idea of artworks as manifestations of social and emotional conduct with an investigation into the artistic productions of women in the Weimar Republic.