I studied Japanese Studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf from 2011 to 2015, including a year at the University of the Ryūkyūs in Okinawa from 2013 to 2014. I subsequently completed the MA programme in Comparative Studies at HHU, graduating in 2018.

In 2024, I received my PhD in Anglophone Studies. My doctoral research examined weird fiction, ontology and ecological thought and formed the basis of my first monograph, Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene: A New Dark Age.

From 2023 to 2025, I worked as a Research Associate at the University of Koblenz, where I continue to teach as a sessional lecturer and remain a research member of the DFG network Traveling Bodies: Bodies and Corporeality in Travel Literature. Since April 2025, I have been a Research Associate in Modern English Literature at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.

My academic formation in Japanese Studies, Comparative Literature and Anglophone Studies continues to shape a research profile that crosses national, disciplinary and medial boundaries.

My research is organised around the relationship between cultural form and worldhood. I examine how literary and audiovisual works create meaningful worlds through space, atmosphere, narrative, temporality, systems, ritual and material environments—and how those worlds register historical pressures that exceed established explanatory frameworks.

Three connected research areas structure this work.

1. Gothic, Weird and Ecological Worldhood

My work on Gothic and weird fiction investigates encounters with forms of existence that challenge anthropocentric models of reality. This includes research on H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Aickman, Charles Dickens, Ray Bradbury, contemporary horror cinema and videogames.

My monograph, Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene, reads Lovecraft’s fiction through ecological crisis, speculative realism, posthumanism and object-oriented ontology. It argues that Lovecraft’s work is not only concerned with cosmic insignificance but with the collapse of inherited relations between human beings, matter, history and world.

My current Dickens research examines descent, death, waste, burial, matter and underworld spaces in the later novels. Across these projects, the Gothic is not simply a genre of supernatural disturbance but becomes a critical form for understanding damaged environments, unstable ontologies and histories that refuse to remain buried.

2. Postsecularity, Revelation and Damaged Authority

A second strand of my research examines the persistence and transformation of religious structures within ostensibly secular cultural forms.

I am interested in revelation, apocalypse, communion, sacrifice, transcendence and adversariality as forms that survive beyond straightforward religious belief. My work considers how literature, cinema and popular culture negotiate experiences that appear meaningful or revelatory while resisting institutional explanation.

This research includes work on UFO disclosure, first contact, vampirism, Black Gothic, ancient-astronaut narratives, horror cinema and the relationship between bureaucracy and revelation. It asks how institutions respond when evidence exceeds the ontologies they were designed to administer.

3. Digital, Audiovisual and Transpacific Cultures

My research on videogames, animation and digital media examines how cultural meanings become spatial, procedural and interactive.

Rather than approaching videogames primarily as narratives, I analyse how mechanics, environments, interfaces, repetition, archives, player agency and embodied navigation contribute to their meaning. Recent work considers Japanese survival horror, metamodernism, the Lacanian Real, global horror circulation and the development of immersive gameworlds.

My background in Japanese Studies also informs research on Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and the international circulation of Japanese cultural forms. This work considers atmosphere, cultural capital, adaptation, ecology, religion and the ways in which culturally marked worlds become globally inhabitable without becoming culturally empty.

Selected Concepts

A central aim of my work is to develop portable concepts that can move across literary, cultural and media analysis.

Veridical Unreality

Veridical unreality describes situations that are empirically well attested and internally coherent but nevertheless appear structurally incompatible with the reality in which they occur. The term identifies a crisis produced not by insufficient evidence but by evidence that existing explanatory systems cannot comfortably absorb.

Astigmatic Epistemology

Astigmatic epistemology names a condition in which individual parts of reality may be perceived with considerable clarity while the available axes of interpretation refuse to converge. The resulting blur is not ignorance but misalignment: local sharpness without a stable global picture.

The Ontological Vanishing Point

The ontological vanishing point is the point at which increasing amounts of information fail to close the distance between explanation and being. More detail produces greater descriptive precision while simultaneously revealing the inadequacy of the ontology through which the phenomenon is being understood.

Anticipatory Humanities

The idea of the anticipatory humanities describes the humanities as a practice of early detection rather than prediction. Literature and culture can register ontological, political, ecological and technological pressures before those pressures become fully legible to institutions or established explanatory systems.

Individual Research Projects

London’s Plutonic Shore

My current project, London’s Plutonic Shore: Death, Descent, and the Underworld in Dickens’s Late Style, examines Dickens’s later writing through waste, burial, descent, material afterlives and the underworld.

Beginning with Our Mutual Friend and extending across works including Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Dombey and Son and A Tale of Two Cities, the project understands Dickensian London as a vertical and Plutonic world in which wealth, bodies, memory and matter continually return from below.

The Ontological Vanishing Point

A second major project, The Ontological Vanishing Point: First Contact and Exo-Culture in Anglophone Literature and Culture, investigates how literature and media imagine contact with forms of intelligence, culture and existence that exceed established human categories.

The project brings first-contact narratives into dialogue with anthropology, ontology, science fiction, UAP discourse and the problem of interpreting evidence whose existence may require a transformation of the explanatory world itself.

Edited Collections and Special Issues

Robert Aickman and Strange Modernity

I am co-editing Robert Aickman: Strange Stories and Spectral Modernities with Robert Edgar for Manchester University Press. The collection examines Aickman’s strange stories through spatial disorientation, temporality, ecological instability, psychological uncertainty and the transformations of modernity. The project is currently being developed with Manchester University Press.

Planetary Genres, Planetary Styles

Together with Martin Bartelmus, I am developing the special issue Planetary Genres, Planetary Styles: American Literatures after the Global for AmLit – American Literatures. The project examines how contemporary literatures of the Americas respond formally to ecological breakdown, migration, extraction, digital infrastructure, technological futurity and damaged conditions of belief.

Rather than treating planetarity as a simple enlargement of geographical scale, the issue asks how genres and styles produce worlds whose ecological, political, technological and metaphysical conditions exceed inherited models of the global. My own contribution examines postsecular worldhood and damaged transcendence in contemporary American speculative fiction.

1990s Gothic

Together with Rebecca Lauren Bruce, I am developing a special issue on 1990s Gothic. The project argues that the decade constitutes a distinct and under-theorised Gothic formation shaped by end-of-history temporality, media-technological uncertainty and the return of religious, folkloric and imperial pasts within supposedly secular modernity.

The planned issue brings together work on film, television, folklore, conspiracy culture, spectral media and millennial Gothic. My own article, “The Summer of Satan,” examines the cluster of Satanic and eschatological films released in 1999 as expressions of postsecular uncertainty and damaged authority.

Extractive Gothic

I am co-editing Extractive Gothic, a collection examining the relationship between Gothic form and extractive modernity. The project considers mines, plantations, infrastructures, landscapes, bodies and other entities transformed into resources, asking how Gothic literature and media register the violence, temporal depth and uncanny afterlives of extraction.

By bringing Gothic studies into dialogue with environmental humanities, political economy and histories of colonialism, the volume explores extraction not simply as a theme but as a world-making system that reorganises matter, labour, territory and life.

Studio Ghibli

Together with Susan J. Napier, I am developing a collection that approaches Studio Ghibli not as a single aesthetic identity but as a site of multiplicity: a studio, archive, industry, transnational formation, ecological imagination and field of collaborative authorship.

The project brings together work on worldmaking, adaptation, labour, atmosphere, religion, technology, cultural circulation and the shifting relationship between individual authorship and the institutional identity of the studio.

My teaching is research-led, concept-driven and interdisciplinary. I have designed and taught more than twenty distinct BA and MA courses spanning eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, modernism, contemporary fiction, children’s literature, Gothic and speculative fiction, cultural theory, film, animation and videogames.

Rather than treating theory as an external framework applied after the fact, my courses use concepts to organise sustained encounters with cultural works. Students learn how form produces meaning through close attention to language, space, mechanics, narrative, sound, image, atmosphere and historical context.

My teaching is guided by three principles:

1. Theory should generate perception rather than merely supply terminology.
2. Assessment should reward depth, synthesis and intellectual independence.
3. Academic rigour is compatible with creative, reflective and personal forms of criticism.

Creative-Critical and Multimodal Assessment

An important area of my teaching is the development of academically grounded video essays and other creative-critical forms.

Students may combine voice, image, gameplay footage, montage, quotation and personal reflection to produce an audiovisual argument. These projects remain firmly grounded in a clear thesis, theoretical engagement, close analysis, source attribution and a script or production reflection. In substantial assessments, an oral defence allows students to demonstrate their command of the argument, sources and formal decisions.

Production value is not treated as a substitute for scholarship. The aim is to teach students to remain intellectually and creatively accountable for what they make.

This work extends Anglistik IV’s interest in Xenogenetic Writing Practices into audiovisual and ludic criticism and contributes directly to the questions of authorship, digital production and critical reflection. 

Supervision

I supervise BA, MA, and PhD projects and welcome conversations about doctoral research within my areas of expertise.

Possible fields include:

• Gothic, horror, weird and speculative fiction;
• Victorian and contemporary literature;
• environmental humanities and posthumanism;
• religion, postsecularity and apocalypse;
• film, animation and videogames;
• Japanese and transpacific media;
• creative-critical and audiovisual scholarship.

I am particularly interested in projects that combine close analysis with an ambitious theoretical or interdisciplinary question.

Teaching Recognition

2026 HHU Teaching Award nomination — Seminars
'In the Shadow of the Great World': Space and Heterotopias in Charles Dickens's Fiction

2026 HHU Teaching Award nomination — Seminars
Through the Looking-Glass: British Children's Literature in Japan

2025 HHU Teaching Award nomination — Seminars
Frankenstein: The First 206 Years

2025 HHU Teaching Award nomination — Emerging Scholar
How Dead Is a Doornail? Dickens and Christmas

2024 HHU Teaching Award nomination — Emerging Scholar
The Dark Side of Children’s Literature

2023 HHU Teaching Award nomination — Seminars
Sentimentalism in Literature

Selected Courses

Gothic, Victorian and Spectral Studies

• Hauntology/Spectrality
• Frankenstein: The First 206 Years
• How Dead Is a Doornail? Dickens and Christmas
• Death in Victorian Literature
• The Defective Real: Realism in Victorian Novels
• The Gothic Dickens
• Gothic Fiction
• Spirits That I’ve Cited: Horror Fiction from Victorianism to the Present Day
• Detective Fiction

Speculative Fiction and Children’s Literature

• Mars Is Heaven: An Enquiry into Science Fiction
• Apocalypse Now
• Weird Fiction
• Through the Looking-Glass: British Children’s Literature in Japan
• The Dark Side of Children’s Literature
• Arcadia and Apocalypse in Children’s Literature
• Postmodernism and the End of Time

Theory, Media and Digital Culture

• Video Games and Critical Theory
• The Fragment in Literature
• How Modern Are We?
• courses in creative writing, academic writing, film, animation and cultural theory.

Editorial Roles

• Associate Editor, International Journal of Disney Studies
• Co-editor of a special issue of Open Philosophy
• Co-editor of the American Literature project Planetary Genres, Planetary Styles
• Co-editor of current collections on Robert Aickman, Studio Ghibli and extractive Gothic

Research Networks

• Traveling Bodies: Bodies and Corporeality in Travel Literature, DFG Network, University of Koblenz — Research Member
• Hauntology and Spectrality Research Network, York St John University — External Research Member

Scholarly Associations

• Society for the Study of the American Gothic
• Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association
• International Gothic Association
• British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies
• International Society for the Study of Egyptomania
• H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society

MONOGRAPH

Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene: A New Dark Age. Routledge, 2025.
http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003545446

JOURNAL ARTICLES

‘”More than Death” Traversing the Ravine with Archetypal Children in Ray Bradbury’s Illinois Stories’ The New Ray Bradbury Review, (8), edited by Phil Nichols, 2024. 81–97. DOI: 10.18060/28542

‘The Fleeting Nature of Joy in Isao Takahata’s Princess Kaguya’ Animation Studies 2.0, edited by Carmen Hannibal and Anastasiia Gushchina, 2024.https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=6908

‘The River on that Day – Water and Identity in the Films of Hayao Miyazaki’ Journal of Children in Popular Culture, Volume 14, Issue 1, Fall 2024. https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/6a58c084-8445-4b4d-b5fb-2bc65b9a6026/downloads/d17df7b8-6c5a-4ea1-b3b5-f1e7726cfd3d/6%20Wilken%20The%20River%20on%20that%20Day.pdf?ver=1735408176064

‘To the Moon, on a Whim: Dionysian Desire and the Dreamlike in Nick Park’s A Grand Day Out (1989)’ Animation Studies 2.0, edited by Carmen Hannibal and Anastasiia Gushchina, June 2025. (in print)

‘”A World That Had No Form” – Haruki Murakami and the Ontology of the In-Between’ Open Philosophy, “Realism, Psychoanalysis, and Critique in a Metamodern Key” special issue, edited by Friederike Danebrock, Martin Bartelmus, Christian Wilken, De Gruyter, open access, Fall 2025. (forthcoming)

‘American Nightmares: Japanese Horror Games Around the Millennial Turn’

American, British and Canadian Studies, “American Narratives and Video Games” special issue, edited by Francesca Razzi and Valentina Romanzi, The Journal of Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, open access, December 2025. (forthcoming)

JOURNAL ISSUES EDITED

‘Realism, Psychoanalysis, and Critique in a Metamodern Key,’ Special Issue, edited by Friederike Danebrock, Martin Bartelmus, Christian Wilken, Open Philosophy, De Gruyter, open access, Fall 2025. (forthcoming)

PEER-REVIEWED BOOK CHAPTERS

‘Illustrated Men and Mischievous Skeletons: The Object-Realm in Ray Bradbury’s Fiction’, in Ray Bradbury: A Companion, edited by Kevin Wetmore, Peter Lang Publishing, 2025. (forthcoming)

‘Hubris as a Vocation. Frankenstein and the Century of Biology’, in “Umbrüche in Europa”, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift. Beihefte, edited by Michaela Bill-Mrziglod and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, Universitätsverlag Winter. (forthcoming)

‘London’s Plutonic Shore: The Thames as a Victorian Styx in Our Mutual Friend’, in Blue Victorian, edited by Shaonli Bhowmik, Ritam Dutta and John C. Ryan, Bloomsbury. (forthcoming)

‘”In Lieu of the Authentic Document:” The Reader’s Role in Dracula’s Epistemic Fragmentation’, in Dracula: A Companion, edited by Matthew Crofts and Madeline Potter, Peter Lang Publishing, 2026. (forthcoming)

‘A World Without Children’s Voices: Cultural Apocalypse in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men’, in Critical Explorations in Science-Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ceng Tan and Mikail Boz, McFarland. (forthcoming)

‘These Trees Know Not Our God: Puritan Fear, Liminal Spaces, and the Dark Ecologies of Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015)’, in Reinventing The Witch: Witchcraft and Sorcery in 21st Century Fiction and Film, edited by Nazan Yıldız Çiçekçi and Cenk Tan, McFarland. (forthcoming)

‘The View from the Vanishing Point: Time, Memory, and the Eerie in Elidor’, in Alan Garner and the Work of Time, edited by Robert Edgar, Wayne Johnson and John Marland, Manchester University Press. (forthcoming)

‘The Phenomenology of Holes in Silent Hill 2’, in Handbook of Body Horror, edited by Subashish Bhattacharjee and Anik Sarkar. (forthcoming)

CONFERENCE ACTIVITY

‘Robert Aickman and the True Weird: Spectrality, Time, and the Unnatural’, Haunted Modernities, Present Pasts and Spectral Futures, Falmouth, UK, July 2025.

‘Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene’, Fantastic Climates, Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung, Kassel, Germany, Conference, Sep 2024.

‘Is Goth Dead? Towards an Anthropocene Goth’, Bela Lugosi’s Dead at 45 – A Celebration of Goth Culture, Virtual Conference, Aug 2024.

 ‘The Five-Headed Monster: Houdini, Lovecraft, and the Enigma of Antediluvian Egypt’, The Egypt Obsession: Past, Present & Future, The International Society for the Study of Egyptomania,Virtual Conference, Oct 2023.

JOURNALISM AND PODCASTS

‘Perpetual Unease: Lovecraft at the Edge of the Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Sundays Ep. 2, Victorian Vanguard, podcast, Youtube, April 2025.

‚Der Weg des Kriegers‘, Gee, issue 74, magazine, edited by Jörg Luibl, March 2025.

‚Über Bushido, Samurai & Japan‘, Spielvertiefung, podcast, hosted by Jörg Luibl, March 2025.

‚Im Gespräch: Christian Wilken‘, Spielvertiefung, podcast, hosted by Jörg Luibl, January 2025.