Foci
My research concentrates principally on German culture during the Weimar Republic and the National Socialist period. I am interested in popular and avantgarde literature and film, pop culture-oriented journalism (on jazz and sport, for example), theater, and cultural theory. I focus on developments within and beyond German borders (e.g. cultural interplay between Germany and the USA during the Weimar years, Nazi entertainment cinema, German exile culture [in Hollywood and elsewhere] from 1933 to 1945). Artists, thinkers, and public figures of interest include Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Jünger, Fritz Lang, Leni Riefenstahl, Max Schmeling, Reinhold Schünzel, and Kurt Tucholsky. Concepts and problems explored include civilization, modernity, corporality, the mass, reading, the relationship between aural and visual experience, and the convergence of aesthetics and politics.

Current projects
Recent publications include articles on Lang's Fury (in the Journal of Film and Video) and Brecht's exile poetry (in Monatshefte); my essay on the 1925 "Kulturfilm" Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit will appear in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, an upcoming volume in the Camden House series "Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual." Recent presentations include "Of Mass Destruction" (German Studies Association conference, Oct 2007), "Triangulating Schloss Gripsholm" (MLA convention, Dec 2007), and "Reading with an Anxious Ear" (Looking after Siegfried Kracauer, Dartmouth College, Nov 2008). I am presently at work on essays based on the Gripsholm and Kracauer papers.

My cv lists selected publications and presentations.