Profile

I am a first-year PhD student with the Warwick Monash Alliance, supervised by Dr. Alex Smith at the Warwick Department of Sociology and by Dr. John Bradley at the University of Monash's Indigenous Studies Centre. I completed my MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy at the University of Oxford's Department of International Development where I researched structural barriers to Indigenous land management in Australia. Before that, I did my undergraduate degree at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, in International Relations: Politics and History, and wrote my dissertation on Indigenous child removal policies in Canada and Australia.

Having grown up between Germany and Australia, I am trying to make sense of the two countries' very different approaches to dealing with their own histories through my research and hope to continue doing so in the future. This is why the topic of reconciliation has always been close to my heart.

Outside of my current research, I pursue creative writing in both the fiction and non-fiction genre.

Research

My PhD project focusses on the interaction between reconciliation in Australia, national identity and collective guilt. I am particularly interested in the idea of private property as part of national identity and its role in the success or failure of Australian reconciliation, in part through its historical link to collective guilt. For this, I will be spending the second year of my PhD based at Monash in Melbourne for my fieldwork.

Areas of interest

• Politics of reconciliation
• Indigenous rights, self-determination and sovereignty
• Collective memory / collective guilt
• National identity
• Creative writing
• Ethnography