•    Hip Hop Studies
•    Sentimentality, Affect, and Public Feeling
•    Gender Studies and Feminist Theory
•    African American Culture and Literature
•    Latinx Culture and Literature
•    Interamerican Studies

I am a teaching and research assistant at Prof. Dr. Katharina Gerund’s chair. Before coming to the University of Zurich, I was a PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary DFG research training group The Sentimental in Literature, Culture, and Politics at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. I hold a joint Bachelor’s degree in English and American Studies and French Philology (FAU) as well as a Master’s degree in Interamerican Studies (FAU and Universitat de València, Spain). Currently, I am working on my PhD project titled Hip Hop Sentimentality.
Focusing on works by Black male rappers, my dissertation seeks to show that, contrary to popular belief, sentimentality is an integral part of US hip hop culture. Although sentimental elements were already present in early hip hop productions, I suggest that rap narratives have successively embraced sentimental tropes and aesthetics over the past three decades, a phenomenon I call the sentimental turn in hip hop culture. Moving its analytical focus from (self-)representations of the Black male individual to depictions of the African American nuclear family and, ultimately, hip hop communities of color, my PhD project sets out to trace the sentimental turn across selected hip hop productions, placing special emphasis on their lyrical and visual dimensions (including rap lyrics, music videos, cover art, and printed materials).

My chapter "‘My Palm and My Trigger Finger Itch, Bitch’: Gangsterism and Female Hustling in Contemporary Hip Hop Culture” was published in the edited volume Ladies in Arms: Women, Guns, and Feminisms in Contemporary Popular Culture (Transcript) in March 2024. I also contributed a chapter titled “Tigers in the Concrete Jungle: Narrating Afro-Dominican (American) Experiences in Contemporary Hip Hop Culture” to the forthcoming edited volumeThe American Immigrant Narrative Revisited (Brill). In September 2026, my article “‘Tears Dropping from the Barbed Wire’: Prison Abolitionism and Hip Hop Sentimentality” waspublished in the European Journal of Musicology. I have presented my research at several (inter-)national conferences and workshops, including the 70th Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies at the University of Oldenburg (Germany) and the 25th Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College (USA).

I am happy to supervise BA theses that match my research interests.