My full cv is available here.
Community Engaged Scholarship | Environmental Humanities |Public Humanities | Energy Humanities | Climate Literacy & Climate Storytelling | Atlantic World and Colonialism | European Pre-Modern Literature and Culture in a Global Context | Utopianism | Ecotopianism | Multilingualism & Translation
My research and teaching span fields usually held apart: early modern German and Atlantic cultural history, on the one hand, and the environmental humanities, on the other. Presently, I am finishing a book, Utopia Found and Lost in Penn’s Woods, that’s been long in the making and exemplifies my research interests. It aims to bridge the disparate timescales between human and natural histories. Propelled by years of archival research in multilingual collections in the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania and in German religious archives, the book reflects on our enduring coloniality today, and it considers the anticolonial histories and stories we need to confront the menace of the Anthropocene. I first began experimenting in methods and practices of connecting fields about a decade ago, when I first offered a class called Sustainability and Utopianism. With the help of its students and still other students and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), it blossomed into the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. Subsequently, and with a series of generous grants and gifts, it became a vibrant hub for community-engaged work and public environmental humanities. I was its director until 2024. Ongoing projects from that environmental humanities lab include three ongoing projects which I direct: The Ecotopian Toolkit for the Anthropocene, My Climate Story, and Intersecting Energy Cultures.
I began my academic career at Penn in 2003 and received tenure two weeks before the birth of my second child, based on a body of work exploring the popularization of reading and the rise of the novel in Europe while also probing early modern transnational fears of the commodification of culture and its increasingly global dimensions. My tenure home at Penn is in German, now part of the newly formed Department of French, Italian, and Germanic Studies. I also hold appointments to graduate groups in Comparative Literature and English as well as the Lauder Program for International Studies. At Penn, I have chaired the College taskforce on climate and ecoliteracy and served on strategic committees for energy, sustainability and the environment and for new directions in the humanities.
You can read a more fulsome statement about my work that I wrote in preparation for promotion to Professor at Penn back in 2021.
Fun Facts
In addition to my traditional and community engaged scholarship, I live and play with my husband, one kid (15), and two big dogs (ages 9 and 7) in Philadelphia. Our older son (19) visits us from his college every now and then. A few other fun facts about me: I am an enthusiastic but not particularly capable sailor. My motto remains: if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot. I work with a Swedish tutor twice weekly and can read almost anything but dread speaking. I buy too many books (but is that really a thing?); and I procrastinate by organizing and reorganizing them–alphabetically, by subject matter, sometimes by size, but NEVER by color.