Biography

My academic career began in Chicago, where I completed a B.A. (2007) and M.A. (2009) in German Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. From there, I moved to St. Louis, where I completed a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures and Film & Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis (2015). Before starting my post at UBC, I served as Assistant Professor of German at Sam Houston State University. I have directed the undergraduate programs in German at both SHSU and UBC and currently serve as Director of the UBC Centre for European Studies.

I believe in scholarly collectives! Much of my own work in this regard has been with the international scholarly network “Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum” (DDGC), which I have co-founded in 2016. I serve on the DDGC Steering Committee and have variously been involved in collaborative ventures such as the DDGC Mutual Aid Network as well as the DDGC Research Cluster Networks initiatives. Since the 2020 conference, "The Pasts and Futures of Queer German Studies," which I co-organized with Kyle Frackman (UBC), I've been part of an unofficial network devised to advance queer and trans German studies. Part of this work entails founding the Robert D. Tobin Lecture in queer and trans German studies at UBC and includes multiple initiatives devised to create infrastructure for the scholarship in these interfields. 

I serve on the editorial boards of Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, Feminist German Studies, and the Women, Gender and Sexuality in German Literature and Culture series. I regularly review manuscripts for scholarly journals, presses, and grant boards in North America and beyond.

My work has been funded by Fulbright, the DAAD, SSHRC, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. 

My personal background: I was born into a Muslim family in the former Yugoslavia. My family fled the Bosnian war. We were refugees in Germany before moving to the USA—a move inspired by German residency visa restrictions. I am a queer scholar.

Current Projects

• a book examining the influence of fluctuating literary markets on authorial agency and narrative form provisionally titled Fragile Poetics: Industrial Print, Precarity, and Literary Form.

• a book of personal essays provisionally titled Tetka Theory: A Queer Life in the Bosnian Diaspora.

• a book on queer media engagement theory grounded in occult practices around 1900.

• a companion to queer and trans German studies (part of a co-edited book series in development).

• a co-edited volume on the work of Lauren Berlant

• a co-edited volume on Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front

• a co-edited volume on Grimmelshausen’s Courasche

• a special issue of ELN on refugee solidarities and worldmaking

• articles or book chapters on early stardom and ethnic difference, media theory and affect studies, pedagogies of unwellness in German studies, palmistry and early cinema fandom, queer film aesthetics, tarot and queer knowledge

• an art-practice project titled “The German Studies Tarot Deck” (reach out if you are interested in participating)

• an undergraduate journal in German studies: Augenblick.