I have been a faculty member of the English Department at Utah Tech since 2006. I regularly teach such courses as Multicultural Literature of the United States, Literature and the Land, Critical Introduction to Literature, and World Literature, along with English composition. In the Environmental Humanities program, I teach EHUM 1010: Introduction to Environmental Humanities.
I organize an English and Environmental Humanities-focused study abroad course to Mexico and take students to service-learning activities with Conserve Southwest Utah. I have also taught literature on field trips to Zion National Park and Catalina Island as well as on study abroad trips to Costa Rica and Mexico. In 2020, I won a learning innovation mini-grant from the Center for Teaching and Learning.
I am originally from Germany. I received my MA (erstes Staatsexamen) from the University of Göttingen and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for a year that I spent at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania. I received my Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in Columbia. My scholarly interests are ecocritical, ecofeminist, and spatial analyses of Southwestern American, border, and multicultural American literature.
My book publications include Myth and Environment in Recent Southwestern Literature: Healing Narratives (Lexington Books, 2014) and the edited volume The Way We Read James Dickey: Critical Approaches for the Twenty-first Century (University of South Carolina Press, 2009). I served as the guest editor for a special issue on gender and space of The Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature (Spring 2015). My essays have appeared in the MELUS journal (Fall 2022), the Journal of Contemporary Thought, and Interdisciplinary Humanities. I also contributed chapters to such edited volumes as Lab Lit: Exploring Literary and Cultural Representations of Science (eds. Olga Pilkington and Ace Pilkington, 2019), Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature (ed. Douglas A. Vakoch, 2012), and Color, Hair and Bone: Race in the Twenty-first Century (eds. Linden Lewis, Glyne Griffith, and Elizabeth Crespo Kebler, 2008).
Because I strongly believe in the value of undergraduate research and having served as chair of the undergraduate research committee for six years, I encourage my students to engage in undergraduate research. If you’re interested and need a mentor, I would love to work with you.
Education