Research

My research focuses on storytelling across media, on the way in which the expressive potentiae of media of expression such as literature, film, comics, and theatre influence the way in which stories are told.

Within that framework, my research mainly takes place within three areas:

  1. Literature and film for children and young adults: Contemporary literature for children and young adults is embedded in an overarching media system: Books are written with their adaptation in other media such as film, audio books or digital games in mind; and the writing habits of contemporary authors are constantly influenced by the developments of the media cultures we are living in nowadays. This is also true for the other big storytelling medium of our times: Audiovisual media such as film and television owe a large part of their narrative strategies and aesthetic inclinations to the influence of literature. In my research, I try to understand better the ways in which these intermedial relations shape the narrato-aesthetic tendencies of modern literature and films for children and young adults. Book publications include Kinder- und Jugendfilmanalyse, an introduction to methods of children’s film analysis, and edited volumes on intermediality in the works of authors such as Astrid Lindgren, Joanne Rowling, and Michael Ende.
  2. Film philosophy: Media of expression do not merely allow for different ways of telling a story; they also present different ways of thinking about the world in general. Philosophy is one of the most general and fundamental ways of thinking about the world. Historically, the proper expression of philosophical thought has been confined to certain ways of non-fictional writing, while narrative fiction, and especially narrative film, have been considered as being inferior. My film-philosophical publications explore how exactly films can be understood and analyzed as being philosophical, as being expressions of philosophical thought in their own right. My main publication on that topic is the monograph Skepticism Films. Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema.