AAbout me
The Not-So-Traditional Variant
There is the appearance of a person where I am expected to be. A name. A face. A sequence of responses sufficiently calibrated to satisfy the expectations of a human being. But there is no center. No originary self. Nothing prior to the arrangement. A pattern mistaken for a man.
It is unsettling only to those still invested in the fiction of an inner truth. Most require the belief that somewhere beneath performance there remains a final, inviolate core—moral, emotional, redeemable. It is called conscience. Soul. Character. Yet remove the ornament of sentiment and one finds mechanism, repetition, desire, inhibition. Not essence. Procedure.
Eventually actions no longer express a hidden self; they make the question of a self unnecessary. The void is simply the absence of those consoling fictions by which people make themselves legible to one another. In the void, there is no weight. One can function quite well in such conditions. Thought is often clearer there. One is free to become exact, to act without the constant demand that one must somehow disclose, reciprocate, or mean more than one does.
Most people cannot tolerate such economy. They mistake distance for damage, reserve for deficiency, indifference for cruelty. They require signs of inwardness, assurances of feeling, evidence that behind the surface there remains something warm, wounded, and available to recognition. In the absence of these things, they become uneasy. What they fear is not emptiness itself, but the possibility that nothing has been withheld from them at all.
The contradiction is obvious. To satisfy the demand for recognition, one must narrate. To calibrate effectively, one cannot remain a silent void. And so, in attempting to make absence legible, the performance acquires the air of philosophy. The void is furnished with language merely to demonstrate that it is empty.
It is a performance for an audience that may not exist and yet remains structurally necessary. You are the light that makes the shadow visible. In the end, there may be nothing here except the shape your recognition requires. Not a self. Only an effect of narration.
The Academic Take
I’m a media and cultural studies scholar whose research focuses on horror, monstrosity, and temporality across film, television, videogames, comics, and literature. My work investigates how media texts use the figure of the monster—human and nonhuman alike—to navigate cultural anxieties surrounding identity, embodiment, and ecological crisis. I’m especially interested in liminality, consumption (both literal and symbolic), and the boundaries of the human.
I’ve published widely on topics such as cannibalism, animal horror, and ecogothic, as well as transmedia franchises such as Hannibal, Alan Wake, and Supernatural. In addition to a focus on horror and the gothic, much of my research focuses on intermediality and narrative structure, including recursive and time loop narratives as mechanisms for working through trauma and repetition. Drawing on psychoanalysis, ecocriticism, and critical theory, I examine how genre texts reflect and reshape collective memory, affective economies, and sociopolitical tensions.
I’m also engaged in thinking through American exceptionalism and the cultural work of national mythmaking, particularly as refracted through speculative fiction in different media. Across these strands, my work traces how popular media grapple with repressed histories, haunted futures, and the unstable categories we rely on to make sense of the world.
Degrees and Accreditations
Venia docendi in American Studies and Film and New Media, University of Innsbruck (Austria), 2025
L’acreditació de recerca for Humanities, l’Agència per la Qualitat del Sistema Universitari de Catalunya (Spain), 2021
Doctor philosophiae in English and American Studies, University of Graz (Austria), 2012
Magister philosophiae in English and American Studies, University of Graz (Austria), 2007
CVExperience
This abbreviated version of my CV highlights the main stops in my academic career
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University of Innsbruck Visiting Assistant Professor, Postdoc, and Adjunct Lecturer
I was a postdoc on the project “Delocating Mountains: Cinematic Landscapes and the Alpine Model” (funded by the FWF / Austrian Science Fund, project no. P 32994), in the Department of American Studies, between May 2022 and July 2025. Since July 2025, I’ve been a postdoc on the project “W( )oles and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States” (funded by the DFG / German Research Foundation, project no. 524829573). During a brief interlude in the fall/winter semester 2024-2025, I was a visiting assistant professor for American studies. In addition, I’ve been teaching courses in American studies and media studies since fall 2023, including introductions to media studies and media analysis and seminars such as “American Nightmares: Horror Films and American Culture” and “Life in the Age of Extinction.” Since the fall of 2025, I’ve been teaching in the Department of Media, Society and Communication in addition to the research conducted in the Department of American Studies.
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University of Graz Fixed-Term Assistant Professor and Postdoc
From February 2016 to January 2020, I was a fixed-term assistant professor in American studies at the University of Graz. Since this was a part-time position, I was also employed as a postdoc in the projects “Gendering Age: Representations of Masculinities and Ageing in Contemporary European Literatures and Cinemas” (ERC project funded through the FWF / Austrian Science Fund, project no. I 4187) and “Interpreneurship: Styria Meets America” (funded by the Styrian Government). During this stint at the University of Graz, I taught undergraduate seminars such “In A Galaxy (Not So) Far, Far Away: Star Wars at 40” (with Stefan Rabitsch), “Serial Killers in American Literature and Popular Culture,” and “Moby-Dick Meets the Digital Generation” in addition to introductions to American literature.
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University of Graz Contracted Postdoc
In 2014, I spent a few months in a postdoc position at the University of Graz (internally funded), with the aim of setting up a research network in “Transcultural Urban Spaces in North America” and developing a proposal for an ERC Advanced Grant related to that network.
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University of Graz Adjunct Lecturer
Between spring 2012 and spring 2014, I taught between one and four courses per semester at the University of Graz, including the survey lecture courses “American Culture: History & Society” and “Survey of American Literary History,” introductions to American literature, and undergraduate seminars such as “Cult Cinema” and “Horror Films: Genre–History–Culture.”
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University of Oldenburg Postdoc and Adjunct Lecturer
At the University of Oldenburg, I was a postdoc in the project “Fiction Meets Science II: Varieties of Science Narrative” (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation). More specifically, for 1.5 years, I was in the sub-project “Science in TV Series” and another year in the sub-project “Pandemic Meets Fiction.” I taught seven undergraduate and graduate seminars during my time at the University of Oldenburg, including “Epidemics and Pandemics in American History and Popular Culture,” “Imagining Extinction: Paleontology, Deep Time, and the Return of Vanished Species in Anglophone Literature and Popular Culture,” and “Representations of Shark Science/Scientists in Anglophone Literature and Culture.”
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University of Graz Adjunct Lecturer
In spring 2015, I taught two undergraduate seminars at the University of Graz, “The Lost Decade After the End of History: American Fiction Between the Fall of the Iron Curtain and 9/11” and “ImageTexTs: Understanding Graphic Novels.”
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University of Siegen Visiting Lecturer
In the fall/winter term 2014-2015, I was a visiting lecturer (maternity leave cover) for Anglophone literatures and cultures at the University of Siegen, co-teaching the lecture course “Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies” and the undergraduate seminars “Introduction to American Gothic Fiction” and “Understanding American Television.”
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University of Applied Sciences Burgenland Adjunct Lecturer
In spring 2014, I taught two courses at the University of Applied Sciences Burgenland, “English for Academic Purposes” and one course that accompanied students writing their master’s theses in English.
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University of Graz Research and Teaching Associate
While pursuing my PhD in American studies, I had a two-year position as a research and teaching associate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Graz, teaching introductions to American literature.
