My teaching and research interests lie at the intersection of Philosophy, Sociology and Politics. I received my PhD (1997) and MA (1993) in Sociology from the New School for Social Research in New York. My post-doctoral work was at New York University's Remarque Institute and Eugene Lang College at the New School University.
I have written four monographs and edited one anthology.
Ambiguous Memory: the Nazi Past and German National Identity, (Bloomsbury 2001) I argued that German memory followed two trajectories: a universalization of the past in the East and an internalization of the past in the West. The book focused on a comparative study of how the Nazi past and the Holocaust were remembered in official speeches and memorials in the two Germany’s during the 1980s and in unified Germany in the early 1990s.
Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe: The Persistence of the Past was published with Ashgate Publishers (2012). It draws from the theoretical work of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin and Zygmunt Bauman to discuss examples from the multiple layers of Europe’s totalitarian past. Central questions that the book addressed were: Why do certain places and not others symbolically capture the past and freeze time? What kind of shadows, traces, ciphers, remnants and ruins does the past leave on the present society? Why does the process of memory, as a fluid and changing activity, seem to prevent its own solidification?
The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies (2015) which I edited provides a comprehensive overview of the latest research within this growing interdisciplinary discipline. Principal themes of the volume include: 1) Memory, History and Time, 2) Social, Psychological and Cultural Frameworks of Memory, 3) Acts and Places of Memory, 4) Politics of Memory, Forgetting and Democracy.
Encountering the Past within the Present: Modern Experiences of Time (Routledge 2020) examines different encounters with the past from within the present – whether as commemoration, nostalgia, silence, ghostly haunting or combinations thereof. Taking its cue from Hannah Arendt’s definition of the present as a time span lying between past and future, I reflect on the old philosophical question of how to live the good life – not only with others who are physically with us, but also with those whose presence is ghostly and liminal. While tradition may no longer command the same authority as it did in antiquity or the middle ages; individuals are, by no means, severed from the past. Rather, nostalgic longing for bygone times and traumatic preoccupation with painful historical events demonstrate the vitality of the past within the present. Divided into three parts, chapters examine ways in which the legacies of World War II, the Holocaust and communism have been remembered after 1945 and 1989. Maintaining a sustained reflection on the nexus of memory, modernity and time in tandem with ancient questions of responsibility for one another and the world, the volume contributes to the growing field of memory studies from a philosophical perspective.
Reintroducing Hannah Arendt (Routledge 2026) connects Arendt’s philosophical and political thought to social theory and the social sciences in the 21st century, as individuals experience profound social, political, and technological change. Her writings on the importance of the world and the power of stories, the prevalence of loneliness and alienation, statelessness, cynicism in politics, antisemitism, imperialism, totalitarianism, and the banality of evil mark her as one of the most original and provocative thinkers of the 20th century.
