Research and Teaching Interests
My approach of "doing" American Studies is located at the intersections of culture studies, cultural history, and popular culture (esp. audio-visual media, i.e. television, film, and video games but also comics/graphic novels and certain music genres). I teach toward creating a class environment that is focused equally on in-class work and extramural impact. I challenge students to develop and enhance an interlocking set of literacies and competences—i) historical and historiographic literacy gained from close reading/text work and comprehensive contextualization of whichever cultural artifacts are the focus of inquiry, and ii) critical media literacy skills derived from offering students popular culture entry points to various core topic areas in American Studies. Let us not forget, we do not experience our world as raw information, figures and/or data points but rather through narrative forms and narrativizing structures which, in turn, acculturate, educate, and simply inform our experience of the world through representations thereof.
Primary fields in American cultural studies and cultural history: Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American cultural history, American popular culture and audiovisual media, twentieth- and twenty-first-century American political culture and history
Specific interests: Nineteenth-century American westward expansion, New Western History, the Global West, livestock raising and horse(wo)manship economies, remediations of historical topoi/mythoi (e.g., the American Revolution/the Early Republic, Slavery/Abolition, the American presidency, etc.) in popular media (esp. TV, film, and video games), American presidential history, American entrepreneurial culture, country music, science fiction across media (esp. TV, film, and video games from the 1980s onward), fan studies, material culture
Would you like to watch me teach? Feel free to check out any of the following lectures:
1) “Petasus Americanus, or a Cultural History of Cowboy Hats” (spring 2020)
2) “Entrepreneurship as Popular National Storytelling Tradition” (fall 2019)
3) “Playing [with] the West: Teaching, Research, and Video Games” (spring 2019)
4) “Is this Mars or Arizona?”: Space and the American Imagination (fall 2016)
5) “Star Trekkin' Across the Disciplines: Why Star Trek still matters?” (fall 2015)
Background and Education
My background and education, as it is reflected in my teaching and research, is perhaps best summarized by a chance encounter with a young girl at the Imperial War Museum in London of all places in the spring of 2018. Getting on the same elevator, she turned around, sized me up and said: "You look like a cowboy who goes to the moon." I was wearing a Star Trek shirt that day and, like every day, a western style hat—aka a "cowboy hat"—sat atop my head. Little did she know that both—American science fiction and the American West—were integral components of my journey as an American Studies scholar.
Coming from a working class background—so, I’m "first gen" college—I had the good fortune of making a few, quite random albeit formative experiences at high school that set my on track to enroll in the English and American Studies program at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. My introduction to American Studies came by way of a year-long methods class in cultural studies whose thematic focus was the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. One thing led to another; I spent my first semester abroad at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, landed an internship at the Austrian Embassy in Washington, DC, and, more generally, I sized every opportunity that allowed me to spend time stateside, especially out West.
My PhD centered on a historical mapping of the transatlantic double consciousness that informs the worldbuilding of Star Trek. My immediate postdoctoral work led me to the University of Graz where I began to develop what would evolve into my second monograph project—a cultural history of cowboy hats (work-in-progress, under contract with University of Oklahoma Press). The project landed me a 6-month Fulbright visiting scholarship which I spent at the Center for the Study of the American West at West Texas A&M in 2019. Staving off employment precarity, which was exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, I was fortunate to spend a little time on an EU-funded visiting professorship at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center. Ultimately, all these trails led me to ILOS and UiO.
Professional and Community Service
- Steering committee member of Teaching American Studies in Norway Working Group (TAS) (since June 2026)
- Board member of the American Studies Association of Norway (since June 2026)
- Coordinator and curator of the academic program at NORCON (since September 2024)
- Co-Director of the Dress and Body Association (since April 2022)
- Co-Founder of the “West of the Rest” research network (since April 2022)
- Founding member and president of the Austrian Association for Cultural Studies, Cultural History, and Popular Culture (since November 2021)
- Group lead of PopCult! - Popular Culture Studies research group (since June 2026)
- Official Country Representative for the Science Fiction Research Association (since December 2019)
- Editorial board member of JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (since November 2016)
