About Myself

I was born in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1969. My youth and childhood were spent in Germany as well as the United States. I attended Elementary School and Gymnasium in Germany as well as Elementary and Junior High Schools in the States. I passed my Abitur (German High School diploma) in 1989. I first enrolled in the University of Freiburg in 1989, where I majored in Philosophy and minored in German Philology and Classics. After a year I switched to the University of Heidelberg, where I graduated in 1994 as a Magister Artium with a joint major in Philosophy and German Philology. Under Reiner Wiehl I wrote my M.A. thesis on Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations. In the fall of that year I began my graduate studies at the University of Wuppertal under the tutelage of Klaus Held and was funded by a stipend of the German Research Foundation (DFG) as of 1995. I spent the 1996/97 academic year as a research fellow at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where I studied especially with Donn Welton. I finished my PhD thesis on the problem of the phenomenological method at the end of 1997 and defended it in the summer of 1998 (with summa cum laude). At the beginning of 1998, I took a post at the Husserl Archives at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. There, from 1998 until 2002, I prepared an edition of a volume in Husserl's collected works, the Husserliana. An edition of this type includes learning Husserl's 19th century shorthand, the “Gabelsberger” system, and in the case of my edition, selecting texts from Husserl's vast Nachlass and editing them in a historical-critical fashion (with apparatus criticus). Doing this task was by far more involving than writing my dissertation. The volume I edited (Husserliana XXXIV) contains a collection of Husserl's late texts (from his “research manuscripts”) on the phenomenological reduction. In the summer of 2002 I moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where I assumed a post-doctoral research position at Emory University, funded in part by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Emory University, while also pursuing teaching duties. My two-year research project dealt with the relationship between the Phenomenological Movement and the school of neo-Kantianism; this topic is of continuing interest for me. As of the summer of 2004, I have been appointed assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and have been promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2008.  In the summer of 2007, I held a visiting professorship at the University of Graz, Austria, and in the summer of 2008, I held a visiting professorship at the University of Puerto Rico, San Juan.

My most significant academic influences were Gerold Prauss, Jann Holl and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann in Freiburg; Reiner Wiehl, Wolfgang Wieland, Hans Friedrich Fulda and Gerhard Buhr in Heidelberg; Klaus Held, Wolfgang Janke and László Tengelyi in Wuppertal; Donn Welton and Edward S. Casey in Stony Brook; Rudolf Bernet and Ullrich Melle in Louvain; and David Carr and Rudolf A. Makkreel at Emory University.

I speak English, German, French, Spanish and Dutch fluently and have reading proficiency in Latin and Ancient Greek.

I admire literature and poetry. My favorite authors are Goethe, Hölderlin, Frisch, Celan, Nabokov, Updike and I also like Latin American literature. The books I am reading currently in my spare time are Die Strudlhofstiege by Heimito von Doderer (the Austrian Proust) and Terry Pinkard's Hegel biography.   In music, I listen to everything from classical to hard rock.

Apart from my work, I enjoy traveling, cycling and follow the events in the professional cycling world. I also like to cook and love good food and wine and have lately discovered Tango.

NEW:  10 Dissertations I wish I had written.

Back