He received his PhD. in 2005 from the Department of German at New York University with a dissertation thesis examining representations of the small and minute in the prose works of Robert Walser. From 2005 to 2006 he held a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at Emory University. He spent the 2015/16 academic year as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow in the Department of Media Studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.