I joined the University of Edinburgh in 2025 as a Lecturer in German Studies. Previously I was a Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford (2019-2024) and a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala (2024-2025). I research modern literature, film, and culture, specialising in European modernism and its global reception and continuing relevance today. I work across several languages, including German, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and Korean.
My first book, "Mann's Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading" (Oxford: OUP, 2022), is the first study of Thomas Mann's landmark German modernist novel "Der Zauberberg" ("The Magic Mountain", 1924) that takes as its starting point the interest in Mann's book shown by non-academic readers, moving from interwar Germany and Soviet Russia to present-day Hollywood and Japan, and beyond. It was a Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize finalist, and the underlying research won the American Comparative Literature Association's Horst Frenz Prize and an honourable mention in the Polish Studies Association's Alquila Polonica competition.
My second book, "Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka" (London: Profile, 2024), aims to introduce my reader-oriented approach to a wider audience. It is an unconventional biography which tells Kafka's story through the stories of his readers around the world, focusing on Oxford, Berlin, Prague, Jerusalem, and Seoul. It was an "Economist" Book of the Year. My work on the reception of Kafka in Korea won a British Academy Talent Development Award and the Ann Moss Early Career Keynote Lecture Competition, organized by Durham University's School of Modern Languages and Cultures to recognize a 'researcher whose early achievements have already made significant impact on the field, and whose research raises innovative questions and opens new pathways of thinking about its future'.
While at IASH, I will be a working on a new project, provisionally titled "Weimar Worlds: A Transcultural Literary History of Interwar Germany".