I studied history and philosophy in Leiden and Berlin, specializing in the philosophy and methodology of the humanities and in intellectual history. In my two MA-theses, I focussed on Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Derridas deconstruction (in history) and on Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation (in philosophy) respectively. My PhD research, conducted between 2006 and 2010 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Willibald Steinmetz at Bielefeld University, was concerned with the emergence of cultural criticism (Kulturkritik) in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Using the methods of historical discourse analysis, I tried to shed new light on this topic, shifting the focus from the canonical ‘family’ of critics to the family resemblances of their language. Since April 2011, I hold the position of “Assistant” at the chair of Comparative History of Western Europe (Prof. Dr. Jörn Leonhard) at Freiburg University. B esides teaching and organizational tasks, I am currently developing a new research project on cultures of oral communication in the ‘long’ 19th century. Other research interests include the history time and temporalization, Enlightenment, intellectual history and historical semantics.