Research Statement

My research sits at the nexus of media studies, poetry, gender studies and computational semiotics.

My research investigates the capacities and limits of language as a medium, focusing on how poetic, technological, and computational forms generate, distort, or withhold meaning. Situated at the intersection of poetics, gender studies, media theory, and computational semiotics, my work bridges German literary studies with philosophical questions about authorship, interpretation, and the mechanisms of linguistic production. Drawing on language philosophy, feminist and gender theory, aesthetics, and the ethics of AI, I explore how poetic forms anticipate or resist the logic of contemporary algorithmic systems.

My current priority is the completion of my first book project, Misbehaving Muses and Malfunctioning Machines: The Epiphanic Feminine in German-Language Poetry after 1900, which traces a shift from traditional feminine tropes of mediation—exemplified by the muse—to technological and computational models of language. Based on my dissertation with a nearly eponymous title, I engage with media-theoretical frameworks such as Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme to show how poets from Rilke to Friederike Mayröcker to Ann Cotten disrupt binaries between inspiration and mechanism by introducing mediators that “malfunction”: mirrors over-replicate, writing machines jumble data. These breakdowns reveal the underlying structures through which meaning is produced.

I argue that Mayröcker’s associative techniques evoke a New Sublime, drawing on Kant to show how poetic language gestures toward computational expansiveness. Ann Cotten extends this evolution into the twenty-first century by mapping computational architectures onto poetic form, staging philosophical and ethical questions central to contemporary debates about large language models. Her work highlights issues of authorship, interpretation, and the boundaries between human and machinic creativity. Together, these studies contribute to a feminist critique of aesthetic theory while engaging broader conversations about the role of computational mediation in shaping language, identity, and cultural meaning.

Future projects extend these questions into affect, sociolinguistics, and AI. In an article in progress, “Making the Melancholic Mood in Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch,” I examine how linguistic structures create affective responses and consider how machines might simulate similar effects. Bringing poetic method into dialogue with computational models, I explore what it means for emotions to be linguistically constructed rather than inherently tied to human embodiment.

Across my research, I therefore seek to illuminate how poetic and philosophical traditions can help us understand data, computation, and the mediated conditions of contemporary life. Rooted in close reading of literary texts yet oriented toward interdisciplinary inquiry, my work contributes to ongoing discussions in the philosophy of technology, language, and the ethics of AI, offering humanistic methods for analyzing meaning-making in a data-driven world.