My scholarly work encompasses two main areas: (1) Critical Theory and its philosophical origins and (2) the aesthetics of modern and contemporary literature. In both areas, I examine problems of representation and representability: I am interested in the historically specific possibilities and limitations of philosophy as a discursive medium and literature as a fictional and imaginary medium. I have published monographs on the work and life of Franz Kafka and on the implicit theory of language in Adorno's literary criticism. My current book project is a multidisciplinary account of the intertwined origins of the Frankfurt School's dialectical concept of the culture industry. I am also in the process of writing and publishing articles on a number of interrelated issues in literary and critical theory: on debates over literary realism, on precarity and narrative form, and on the relationship between abstract labor and the work of art.

I have been at Wesleyan since 2004. In 2017, I was promoted to Professor of German Studies with a core appointment in the College of Letters. In 2015 and 2016, I was a research fellow at the Berlin Center for Literary and Cultural Research. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Hamburg, my M.A. at the University of Michigan, and my Ph.D. at New York University. I teach a wide array of classes, including courses on Nietzsche, Kafka, Marx and Marxism, Weimar Modernism, contemporary German literature, the Frankfurt School, and German Romanticism. I am also currently serving as director of the College of Letters.