Associate Professor of German
University of Toronto

Academic

Background

  • I am an award-winning educator, offering courses in German literature, language, and theatre.

  • I earned my MA from the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (1996) and my PhD from The Ohio State University (2004), where I wrote my dissertation on the history of Turkish-German theatre and political cabaret. (More here.)

  • My teaching experience spans several institutions, including the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of New Mexico, and the Goethe-Institut in Thessaloniki, Greece.

  • Since 2006, I’ve been teaching at the University of Toronto. I served as Associate Chair from 2007–2012 and again from 2017-2022, with particular responsibility for the department’s undergraduate program.

    For publications, courses, and other academic information, see my University of Toronto Profile.

Interests

  • Turkish-German Culture: My principal research field is Turkish-German literature, theatre, and cultural history, with a particular interest in migration, performance, and questions of identity and belonging.

  • Drama in Education: Theatre has long been central to my work - on stage and in the classroom. I’ve directed and performed in numerous productions and founded Theater DU (German Theatre Toronto), where I explore performance as a form of language learning, interpretation, and cultural encounter.

  • Memory, Identity & Autofiction: Much of my recent writing and teaching explores the shifting territory between personal memory, cultural inheritance, and storytelling, particularly in German-Turkish and German-Jewish contexts.

  • Vampires Like Us: Long before they sparkled, I wrote my MA thesis on vampires in literature. The fascination apparently proved difficult to kill: since 2011, I have regularly taught Our Vampires, Ourselves, a popular course exploring what vampires and other monsters reveal about cultural fears, desires, and power. Over the years, the course has attracted attention well beyond the classroom, with features by the University of Toronto, the German Embassy Ottawa’s So German blog, and The Canadian Press.

Monograph

Die Geschichte des türkisch-deutschen Theaters und Kabaretts - Vier Jahrzehnte Migrantenbühne in der Bundesrepublik, 1961-2004 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2022)

Based on extensive conversations with the artists who shaped it, complemented by archival research, the book traces four decades of Turkish-German theatre and political cabaret, from the beginning of labour migration in the early 1960s to the early twenty-first century. It reconstructs a largely overlooked theatrical history while examining how the stage became a space for negotiating migration, identity, politics, and belonging. The appendix preserves fourteen of these interviews in full.

Selected Reviews:

„… ein grundlegendes Werk für die Dokumentation und kulturwissenschaftliche Aufarbeitung der ersten vier Jahrzehnte des türkisch-deutschen Theaters und Kabaretts und damit ein wichtiger Beitrag zur deutschen Theatergeschichtsschreibung.“

—Jörg Esleben, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 60.4 (2024), 417-18.

“… eine lesenswerte und verständliche Monografie, die den Leser, gleich welcher Herkunft, auf eine intensive türkisch-deutsche Reise schickt.“ 

—Hasibe Kalkan, Brecht-Jahrbuch 49 (2024), pp. 310-14.

Selected Interviews & Media