Research Statement

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

Inspired by my interest in language experimentation in German poetry from the turn of the twentieth century to today, my research sits at the nexus of media theory and gender in works ranging from German Modernism to contemporary poetry. My current project, which examines the poetic function of the feminine within the broader media evolution from muse to machine, seeks to define and explore a set of concepts that bridge media and technology studies, language philosophy, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and gender studies.

My research priority will be the completion of my first monograph, tentatively titled Defective Media: The Feminine Function in German Lyric Poetry since 1900. Based on my dissertation, my project takes its point of departure from the modernist shift toward paradigms of poetic materiality rather than poetic inspiration, and from the accompanying shift in conceptions of the poetic medium. While I accept the part of Friedrich Kittler’s canonical media history that consigns the Romantic beloved (and mother) functions to anachronism, I argue that this function of the feminine as medium of transformation has retained its relevance as the backdrop against which many of the most interesting 20th and 21st century poetic experiments unfold, particularly in the hands of female poets. My intervention lies in my claim that the poets of my dissertation intentionally employ defective media, that is, traditional tropes of feminine mediation, like mirrors and channels, that are no longer presumed to “work” as they did before—and that precisely for this reason prove poetically productive. Pushing against Kittler’s premise outlined in Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (1985), I argue, in other words, that the breakdown of the feminine function must not mean the end, but can also be the origin of poetry. As a result of defective media, the poets of my project – Rainer Maria Rilke, Friederike Mayröcker and Ann Cotten – create a poetic form that allows them to leverage the paradigms of poetic materiality with those of poetic inspiration in order to rethink the concept of the medium itself. I also demonstrate that a poetics based on this new notion of mediality already anticipates an understanding of language vis-à- vis contemporary probability-based Large Language Models. My research for this project draws on aesthetic theories and ideas by Friedrich Schiller, Emmanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel and Gilles Deleuze, psycho-analytical conceptions of cybernetics, subjectivity and gender by Jacques Lacan, and is informed by post-structuralist thinkers, including Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida.

My future research will continue to query the nexus of poetic language, classical German media theory, and new developments in AI technology. By leveraging poetic form with affect theory, sociolinguistics and topics around artificial intelligence, for instance, I aim to explore how emotions or moods might be generated in non-lyrical texts via poetic techniques. Currently, I am planning an article titled “Making the Melancholic Mood in Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch,” which examines how language structures inform readers’ perception of melancholy. Bringing the poetic into conversation with AI technology and cognition science, I ask how emotions are mediated linguistically, thereby challenging our understanding of emotions as inherently tied to the animate. While situated within the discipline of poetic writing, my research thus moves beyond my field and invites cross-disciplinary collaboration to seek answers to pressing ontological questions of contemporary relevance.