My first book, The Icon Curtain: The Cold War's Quiet Border (University of Chicago Press, 2015), is about the German wall that didn't fall in 1989, the so-called "prayer wall." It tells the story of how contemporaries (German refugees, especially) dramatized an uneventful Cold War landscape, which stretched between West Germany and Czechoslovakia, fortifying a Cold War border of their own. It weaves together travelogues, accounts of defaced Christian imagery, poems, border police reports, church records, and other archival sources. The book received Honorable Mention for the Modern Languages Association's biannual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures for 2014-15. A Chinese translation appeared with the Shandong Pictorial Publishing House in 2018.
Together with Irene Kacandes, I co-edited the volume Eastern Europe Unmapped (Berghahn Books, 2017), which pushes against the perception that for this part of the world, geography has been destiny. The topic of Eastern Europe beyond its geographical borders runs through my research on the Cold War broadcaster Radio Free Europe. Drawing on the station's corporate archive at the Hoover Institution and documents in German archives, I have published a number of articles about its environmental and televisual history.
With Michelle Moyd and David Gramling, I co-wrote a programmatic book Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (Palgrave Pivot, 2018). Its gist appears here and here. The book is an appeal to think more deeply and collaboratively about the political aspects of language use and see them as inseparable from multilingualism.
I am currently writing two books. The first is a critique of the funambulic imagination, or the common century-old impulse to use the abstract tightrope walker figure to relate to catastrophe and to feel and measure empathy-by-proxy. By way of a counterpoint, the book focuses on just one especially adaptable high wire troupe, the Camilla Mayer Troupe, and its dramatic and not always empathy-worthy rise, death, and resurrection in Germany in World War I, the Nazi era, and the early Cold War years. As Germany's ever-fickle mirror, the popular troupe connected obsessions with Alpinism with the perils of postwar rubble mountains, the discovery of stratospheric flight with the rise of extreme circus spectacle, Nazi "sacrifice readiness" with light entertainment, Germany's postwar reconstruction with its early Cold War division. The story grew out of my essay for The Cabinet Magazine and will appear with Cabinet Books in 2024.
The second book, Curious George: A Biography, reconstructs the life and afterlife of the fictional "monkey" Curious George--one of the world's most famous and successfully marketed literary characters--in his cultural and historical contexts. It uncovers the Northern German roots and global colonial connections of the figure's creators, Margret and H. A. Rey, and their German-Jewish families. The book traces the couple's circuitous migrations between Europe and South and North America, documenting their encounters with wild animals en route. And it recounts the stories of primate extraction, capture, and upkeep in zoos, private homes, primatology labs, and books for children and adults to introduce Curious George as a repository of changing cultural, zoological, and social knowledges about animals, rather than a metaphor for human experiences of uprooting and displacement, as he is currently known. Public writing related to this project has appeared in LA Review of Books and Hypocrite Reader.
I am passionate about rigorous public writing and have written for Artforum, The Washington Post, Reuters, The Guardian, The Smithsonian Magazine, Boston Review, Euronews, LA Review of Books, Pacific Standard, Al Jazeera America, and others. I am always thrilled to mentor students keen on trying this kind of work and frequently assign various forms of public writing in my courses.
I teach across the German Studies curriculum (including language) and in Comparative Literature, where I have served as chair, graduate program director, and M.A. student advisor. My teaching and mentoring strengths include critical animal studies, circus cultures, biography, graphic arts and book illustration, war aftermaths, Cold War culture, politics of German environmentalism, propaganda, science fiction under socialism, nostalgia for socialism, civic language and linguistic justice, multilingualism and monolingualism, and belonging in Germany.