2021
Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Education in the Humanities, University of Cologne

2020
Associate Professor, University of Cologne

2017-2019
Juniorprofessor/ Assistant Professor, University of Cologne

2016
Research Stay at the University of Bath (UK)

2014-2017
pro tempore Professorship Didaktik, University of Cologne

2009-2017
Junior Lecturer at the Department of English II at the University of Cologne

2011
PhD in English Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen

The project makes a necessary intervention within the rapidly expanding field of interdisciplinary climate change communication and against the background of science-centred literacy debates, which largely ignore the contribution of the humanities. It thus responds to urgent calls by scholars and policy-makers to address the challenge of climate change by paying attention to the complex embeddedness of climate change in individual and sociocultural contexts. Rather than offering ‘cli-fi’ book recommendations and reducing the function of literature either to a more pleasurable form of information transfer or to the affective dimension of evoking sympathy or concern, it develops a new notion of climate change literacy that is built on a reassessment of the cognitive, affective, and pedagogic potentials of literary writing. After laying the necessary theoretical groundwork, it moves to illustrate the specific contribution literary studies can make to an adequate understanding of and response to climate change through the analysis of a selection of popular contemporary climate novels. The project group consists of three scholars with expertise in interdisciplinary literary studies, cultural literacies, and education for sustainability.

(Volkswagen Stiftung Az.: 9A794)

The project investigates cultures of death and imaginaries as well as practices of dying in light of the existential threats of climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss and explores the pedagogic implications for a sustainability education in times of large-scale species extinction and the pre-trauma of run-away climate change.

The project launches an interdisciplinary research initiative on wellbeing and resilience by facilitating exchange between philological and pedagogical researchers in Germany and Canada. It draws on the potential of literary fiction to model future imaginaries and formulate moments of resistance that cater to wellbeing and resilience.