Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Faculty Member, Department of English and Linguistics

About

I have been a professor of English Literature at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz since 2003. My research fields are early modern culture and literature as well as twentieth-century and contemporary Anglophone literatures and cultures. I also have a long-standing interest in exploring the interface between literature and linguistics.

Having tampered with "theory" for much of my early career (especially with a certain Lacan-inspired cultural materialism), I have in recent years returned to reality, and to methodologies better suited to the understanding of life than those currently still popular in the Humanities. Literature, after all, is part of human life. Created by human beings, it cannot be thought about as tucked away in an exclusive niche unerelated to humans' "ordinary" experiences. Today my work is influenced by the cognitive sciences and evolutionary biology/psychology, which I find fruitful methodologies to answer the fundamental questions that had led me to the study of literature in the first place: Why do we love books? What makes novels work and readers tick? How do we respond to fiction and why?

Contact Information