About
Before coming to UM, I worked as an Adjunct Assistant Lecturer at the Institute for American Studies at Leipzig University, Germany from 2017 to 2019, and as a Guide for the Germany Close Up program. I received both my B.A. (2012) and M.A. (2016) in American studies from Leipzig University and spent two semesters at Ohio University in 2011 as a BA Plus Fellow.
In 2013/14, I spent a year at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, MI as a Service for Peace Fellow through the Service for Peace program of Action Reconciliation Service for Peace. During my time in Detroit, the processes and issues that have shaped the Metropolitan Detroit region over the course of the 20th and 21st century started to interest me. One result of these growing interests was Growing Together Detroit, an alternative summer break program I helped setting up with activists from Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, Repair the World (Detroit), and the Eden Gardens Block Club. Also academically, Metropolitan Detroit became my spatial focal point. Bringing together intellectual history with urban studies, political economy, and cultural history, I wrote my MA thesis about Detroit philosopher and activist Grace Lee Boggs. My teaching at Leipzig University revolved around the process of deindustrialization and its social and economic consequences in the Detroit-Windsor region and the North Atlantic, and the history of the 1967 Detroit Riot.
My current research interests focus on the 1950s/60s debates in the U.S. and Europe about the social and economic repercussions of automation, cybernation, and the restructuring of the labor market and society.
