• English literature since 1800, esp. the long nineteenth century and its cultural afterlife 
• Intermediality, film, visual culture 
• Gender 
• Celebrity culture 
• Queenship, royalty 
• Economic criticism, debt studies, women and money 

The focus of my professorship is on English literature and culture since 1800. Key issues on which I have worked extensively include the relationship between literature and other media, especially film, the public voices of female singers, actors, speakers and preachers in nineteenth-century fiction as well as the connection between political power and femininity in representations of queenship. I also take a keen interest in and have published widely on the cultural fascination with celebrity, the role of debt narratives in Victorian novels and the imagination of women’s socio-economic agency in the long nineteenth century. I am the author of Figurations of Exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov (Edinburgh UP, 2008) and Female Performers in British and American Fiction (De Gruyter, 2018) as well as the  co-author, together with Elisabeth Bronfen, of Die Diva: Eine Geschichte der Bewunderung (Schirmer/Mosel, 2002). I obtained my degrees from the University of Zurich. During my studies, I spent one year at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation allowed me to carry out research for my PhD and Habilitation thesis at SUNY Buffalo, the University of Chicago and the University of London. 

I teach and supervise students at all levels (BA, MA, PhD). I am currently serving as the English Department’s Director of Studies (Programmdirektorin) and Deputy Head of Department. I am also the President of the Swiss Association for North American Studies (SANAS). 

I am currently working on a primary source collection on celebrity in the long nineteenth century for Routledge in collaboration with Professor Charlotte Boyce (University of Portsmouth) and Dr Sandra Mayer (Austrian Academy of Sciences ÖAW). As a member of the DFG-Netzwerk ”Methodologies of Economic Criticism", I am exploring a range of economic topics in literature and culture and contributing to a book to be published in the Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics series. I have been invited by the Literaturhaus Zurich to give a talk on debt in nineteenth-century fiction as part of a literature festival on poverty and wealth in literature, which will take place in late February 2025. Together with Professor Katharina Gerund, I am co-organizing the 2026 SANAS conference on “American Un/Freedoms”, which we will host at the University of Zurich. 

Courses I offer regularly: Textual Analysis Lecture, MA Seminar Reading Literary and Critical Theory, Thesis Colloquium for MA and PhD Students.