My research interests encompass contemporary German-speaking culture in a number of forms - literary, filmic, and more broadly socio-political. I'm very interested in the Nobel-prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek and continue to publish articles and chapters on her work.  My recent work and publications have focused on issues concerning literary and cultural protest, or resistance against the extreme right in present-day Austria. 

Contemporary German Cultural and Literary Studies, including film studies, single-author/playwright/film-maker studies, women's studies, and especially interested in Austrian Studies

GERM 100/101: German Studies Part I, 'German in Context'

GERM 201: German Language: Written Skills

DELC 212: Society on Screen: The Language of Film

DELC 352: Images of Austria: National Identity and Cultural Representation

DELC 401: Core Skills PGT & PGR FASS 618: 'The PhD Viva: Tragedy or Triumph?'

My main research focus currently is in contextualising and analysing various different forms of cultural resistance to the far-right in Austria. The impetus is presented by the rise to institutional power of Austria's Freedom Party (FPÖ) in 2000 when it formed a coalition government with the People's Party. This event spawned a great number of works, texts, performances, films, essays, and songs that have consciously expressed resistance against and criticism of this turn to the right. I address these phenomena in The Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century (Berghahn Books). 

My recent publications have focused on intercultural themes in contemporary, Austrian culture, dealing, for example, with Austrian-Slovenian cultural history and conflict, with multicultural influences in twenty-first century literature and film, with the representation of sport in culture and as constitutive of national identity, and with popular music and films as examples of cultural protest.

Editorial and International Boards

I am a member of the international advisory and editorial boards of the journal Austrian Studies, the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre (based at the Institute for Germanic and Romance Studies, London) and the Elfriede Jelinek Forschungszentrum, Vienna.

The Elfriede Jelinek Research Centre in Vienna is on line at: http://www.praesens.at/elfriede-jelinek-forschungszentrum/. It has recently (2020) launched an inter-university research alliance (and I am one of two scientific partners from Lancaster University). 

I have also been elected to the board of the Austrian Studies Association (a US based professional body).

Membership of Associations: 

In addition to being a member of the above bodies, I am also a member of the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland and Women in German Studies (UK and Ireland)