About

I am Lecturer/Assistant Professor in German at University College Dublin with a research interest in female agency, manuscript cookery books, and book history in the long eighteenth century.

My research project ‘Women in the Shadow: Female Agency in the Eighteenth Century’ aims to map out the social and economic positions women and men held in eighteenth-century German-speaking countries, based on material remnants that have been passed down to us such as letters, diaries, and manuscript recipe books. Grounded in the field of material studies and as part of the material turn in the humanities, I aim to provide a solid basis for a re-examination of how women and men worked and socialized, one not based on the works of famous theorists and philosophers but on the mundane, everyday-life notes and artefacts of people who often remain in the shadows due to their minimal or non-existent connection to famous figures.

I have worked as Postdoc in German at the Department of Modern Languages at Uppsala University fom 2020-22, Lecturer in German Studies at Bangor University from 2019-20, held several short-term positions at the University of Liverpool from 2013-2019 and taught as German Language Tutor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (2017-18). My thesis, ‘Memory, Education, Circulation, Prestige: Form and Function of the Austrian Manuscript Cookery Book in the Long Eighteenth Century’, focuses on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century manuscript cookery book as object, its function, and female authorship and ownership. I was awarded my doctorate by the University of Liverpool in 2019.

My publications in the history of food and cookery include The Austrian Manuscript Cookery Book in the Long Eighteenth Century. Studies of Form and Function (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2022), ‘The Chameleon in the Kitchen: The Plural Identities of the Manuscript “Cookery Book”’, in Eve Rosenhaft, Helga Müllneritsch and Annie Mattsson (eds.), The Materiality of Writing: Manuscript Practices in the Age of Print (Uppsala 2019), ‘The ‘Who’ of Manuscript Recipe Books: Tracing Professional Scribes’, in Sjuttonhundratal: Nordic Yearbook for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2017) and ‘The Roast Charade: Travelling Recipes and their Alteration in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Tim Berndtsson et al (eds.), Traces of Transnational Relations in the Eighteenth Century (Uppsala 2015).