She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature and culture with research interests in literary multilingualism, minority discourses (especially Turkish-German and German-Jewish), transnational studies, and gender studies. She received her PhD from Cornell University. She is the author of essays on migration, gender and Islam, multilingualism, and Holocaust literature that have appeared in books and in journals such as Cultural Critique, Parallax, and German Life and Letters. She is working on a coauthored book on immigrant acts of coming to terms with Nazism and the Holocaust in present-day Germany.