I am a visiting By-Fellow in Critical Dance Studies and Modern Languages (German) and Professor at the Institute for Theater Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. I was an Early Career Research Fellow at Churchill College from 2002 to 2004, and Fellow, College Teaching Officer and Director of Studies in German and Modern and Medieval Languages at Emmanuel College from 2004 to 2022. My research and teaching interests cover dance and movement research, especially theories and aesthetics of Western theatre dance since 1800, theories, practices, and ethics of gesture, dance historiography, dance and literature since 1800, dance and film, and broader questions of critical theory in relation to the body.
My books, edited collections and special journal issues include a study of dance in the works of Heinrich von Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Heinrich Heine (Routledge, 2006), the culture of gestures at the beginning of the twentieth century (OUP, 2019), new German dance studies, the ethics of gesture, cultural pleasure, and the queerness of dance modernism.