I was first trained in English and Germanic Studies at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena (East Germany). In 1989, I embarked on a second career in Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, and Chinese Art and Archaeology at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. After my doctorate in 1998, I taught at Christian Albrechts University in Kiel (where I habilitated in 2004) and Albert Ludwigs University, Freiburg. In 2007, I joined the faculty of ALC at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

I am the author of a monograph on the notion of sleep in early Chinese literature (2001) and the co-editor of three conference volumes (all in German). My second monograph Letters & Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China, is going to be published with Washington University Press in early 2013. I am also preparing a Handbook of Chinese Letter Writing, that is going to collect papers given at the workshop Letters and Epistolary Culture in China in Boulder in August 2012, along with contributions of several other scholars.

Apart from letter writing, my research focuses on other fields of early and early medieval Chinese literature, in particular on literary thought (especially in Wenxin diaolong), reflections on nature and wilderness in the poetry of Xie Lingyun (385–433) and others, as well as on literary representations and medical ideas of sleeping and dreaming.

 

Last update: January 2013