Research
The Berlin Conference, illustrated in Die Gartenlaube, 1884.
My work asks how print culture teaches people to live with violence.
Book Manuscript
Paper Empire: Print Culture and the Colonial Imagination in Imperial Germany
Paper Empire argues that narrative voice — not content, not propaganda — was the primary technology through which German print culture made colonial violence habitable for ordinary readers, turning conquered territory into an imaginative extension of Heimat, home.
The book's central idea is what I call the unsigned voice: the way a printed page can make a claim that no one has to answer for. Not a writer hiding behind anonymity, and not a policy someone set, but the meaning that arises from arrangement itself — what is set beside what, what a caption says, what an ornament shows — speaking with all the authority of print while belonging to no one. It is how a family magazine —Die Gartenlaube—could run a genocide beside a world's fair in the same year and leave the killing almost unsaid, with no one having decided to say it.
Reading across six decades of German print, from 1855 to 1918 — the mass-circulation family magazine that sat in thousands of parlors, settler memoirs, soldiers' campaign novels, and the illustrated colonial fiction written for German children — the manuscript traces how narrators managed a reader's access to the humanity of the colonized. It ends with the sworn, signed testimony of Herero and Nama survivors in the 1918 Blue Book: the first place in the archive where the colonized speak in something close to their own voice.
The manuscript is complete in draft at approximately 80,000 words of body text, and is in final revision during a fellowship year at the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Williams College.
Articles
"Naming, Translation, and Linguistic Implication in Gurnah's Paradise and Afterlives." [Revise and resubmit].
Book Reviews
Dissertation
"Mediating the Colonial Other in the German Empire." PhD dissertation, Washington University in St. Louis, 2023. Advisor: Lynne Tatlock. Under embargo until April 2038.
Talks and Presentations
Invited Talks
"The Model Migrant and the Colonial Mindset: Narratives of German Settlement in the Midwest and Africa." German Studies, Swarthmore College, 2026.
"Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte und ihr Nachleben." Kansas State University, 2026.
"Reviewing German Colonialism." Africa and Europe in the Age of Colonialism, Department of History, York University, 2026.
"Reading (as) Socialization: Juvenile Colonial Literature in Imperial Germany." Colloquium, Center for Global Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Williams College, 2025.
"Mediating the Colonial Other in the German Empire." Department of Modern Languages, University of Mississippi, 2024.
Conference Presentations
"The Prophetic, the Political, and the Personal: Three Forms of Anti-Colonial Resistance in German South West Africa." Workshop on Southern Africa, Falls Village, Connecticut, 2026. Pre-circulated paper with a formal discussant.
"We Name You Back: Indigenous Counter-Naming and German Colonialism in Namibia." Lagos Studies Association, June 2026.
"Teaching Entanglement: Gurnah's By the Sea and German Colonial Legacies" and "From Maji Maji to the Marketplace: Resistance in Gurnah's Paradise and Afterlives." Northeast Modern Language Association, Pittsburgh, 2026.
"From World's Fair to World's Crimes: Die Gartenlaube and Germany's Global Image in 1904." German Studies Association, Arlington, Virginia, 2025.
"Refugee Narratives and Colonial Legacies in Gurnah's By the Sea." American Comparative Literature Association, 2025.
"Between Two Worlds: Africans Raised in East Germany and Their Return to Africa." Northeast Modern Language Association, Philadelphia, 2025.
"Unveiling Postcolonial Identities: Gurnah's Afterlives and German Colonial Legacies." Northeast Modern Language Association, Boston, 2024.
Organizing and Service to the Field
Moderator, "Excavating the German 'Reading Nation,' 1871–1914," and roundtable participant, "Diaspora Studies Pedagogy." German Studies Association, 2026.
Faculty Mentor, CV Clinic. Northeast Modern Language Association, 2026.
Panels organized: "Displacement, Identity, and the Colonial Legacies" (ACLA, 2025); "Decolonizing Education and the Politics of Knowledge Production" (NEMLA, 2024); "Post-colonialism and the Struggle for Identity I & II" (NEMLA, 2024).