My research currently covers digital feminisms and feminist media studies, performance art, and popfeminism, and I am interested in scholar-activism and feminist leadership. I have recently published the books Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism (with Maria Stehle, McGill-Queens, 2016), Revolting Families: Toxic Intimacy, Private Politics, and Literary Realism in the German Sixties (Toronto, 2013), and articles on contemporary feminisms and German culture. I have coedited five peer-reviewed collections, including Digital Feminisms (Routledge, 2016) and I have been managing co-editor of two international journals, Women in German Yearbook and Seminar: Journal of Germanic Studies, and I co-founded Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies. She has received awards for teaching and research.
After spending time researching and teaching at the University of Potsdam in Germany, Trinity College Dublin, and the National University of Ireland Maynooth, I joined the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta in 2008. I am currently Chair of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies and Professor of German Studies at the University of Alberta. I have given invited lectures at universities in Canada, the US, Germany, and Ireland, and I have been a Visiting Professor at Reed College (USA) and Maynooth University (Ireland). In 2015, I received the Faculty of Arts Research Excellence Award (Associate Professor) and in 2013, I received the Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Teaching Award (Early Achievement) and the Provost’s Award for Early Achievement of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
My current research is on digital feminisms and I co-manage the Digital Feminist Collective, a research commons gathering projects on digital feminisms that collectively ask after the future of feminism and feminist activism, the meaning and limits of global feminist solidarity, creativity, and transnational collaboration. The three projects currently underway—Feminist Scholar-Activism, Just Futures, Technologies of Popfeminist Activism—offer strategies for scholarly political work in the digital and non-digital world by opening up different ways of crafting connections, communities, and discourses.
The DFC was kickstarted with the project "Technologies of Popfeminist Activism" (funded by a three-year SSHRC Insight Grant), in which I—along with Maria Stehle at the University of Tennessee Knoxville—look at how feminist activism has been reconfigured in the 21st Century through digital technologies. The project has resulted in a special issue of Feminist Media Studies on Digital Feminism (2015), numerous article publications, an online lecture series, and multiple presentations and invited lectures in North America and Europe. Our book Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism (2016), in which we look at the awkward politics that such activism produces is available with McGill-Queen's University Press. In it, we suggest that theorizing the awkward can get at the complicated meanings and unstable positions of the political in popfeminist digital activism, but can also have implications for feminist ethos and a feminist academy.