Bio: As Associate Dean of Academic Personnel and Administration in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University, I work with the Dean to support Chairs and Program Directors as well as faculty and academic staff. Most significantly, part of the Culture of Care and Cultivating Your Path to Intellectual Leadership (CPIL) initiatives, searches and faculty review procedures, College-wide faculty development and leadership initiatives, and creating habits of diversity, equity, and inclusion across the College. People first. From staff, to part-time lecturer, to student, to pre-tenure, to full professor and even those administrators.

A Professor of German Studies with a past dual appointment in an International Studies program, my interests are inherently local/global and interdisciplinary. My work has focused on literary history and film in the area of utopian/dystopian studies and comparative science fiction of the Cold War. Recently, I co-edited Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East with Anindita Banerjee (2018). Current interests include the future of AI in teaching and learning, women in leadership in higher education, and recent portrayals of fascism in science fiction/dystopian media. Currently I am a co-PI on the Big Ten Academic Alliance Less Commonly Taught Languages Partnership funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation. Consider submitting a proposal to publish in the book series that I co-edit with Gerry Canavan (Marquette) – World Science Fiction Studies with Peter Lang Oxford. Together with Lisa Yaszek, Wendy Pearson, and Keren Omry, I am co-editing the Routledge Companion to Gender in Science Fiction. I was President of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL) in 2015. In addition, I am proud to serve as the Vice President of the Science Fiction Research Association 2019-2022 and recently hosted the 44th conference of the Society for Utopian Studies 2019. I was a Professor of German and Eastern European Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University from 2001-2015 and served as Department Chair.  From 2015-2017, I served as Chairperson of the Department of Linguistics & Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages at MSU.