She is the co-director of the Centre for Australian Studies CAS at the University of Cologne (2016-) and co-coordinator of a network of German universities developing an interdisciplinary online teaching platform in Australian Studies (2015-). She is also president of the German Association of Australian Studies (GASt). Her research interests are gender studies, postcolonial and diaspora studies, anglophone drama and performance studies. She is also the editor of the e-journal genderforum and GenderInn, a gender studies data base.

Publications include Gothic Renaissance (with Elisabeth Bronfen, Manchester UP 2013), Decolonizing the Landscape: Indigenous Cultures in Australia (with Kay Schaffer, Rodopi 2014), Nature and Environment in Australia (with Boris Braun and Victoria Herche, wvt Trier 2018), and Ecocritical Concerns and the Australian Continent (with Helen Tiffin, Rowman & Littlefield 2019). Current research projects focus on indigenous performances of ecological concerns in Australia, as well as on Kim Scott and Alexis Wright in the context of world literatures.

Previously he was an Associate Professor at the University of South Australia, Professor of Film and Visual Culture at the University of Derby, and the founding Director of the Centre for New Zealand Studies, Birkbeck, University of London.

He was the 2005 MacGeorge Visiting Scholar at the University of Melbourne, and 2005-6 was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford, in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Chair of the New Zealand Studies Association since 1997, and member of the Executive for the Pacific History Association, he is Principal Editor of the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies, and a board member of Notes of the Anthropological Society Vienna, and Studies in Australasian Cinema. He has been a Guest Editor of the Harvard Review, Post Script, Asian Cinema, and Studies in Travel Writing. The author of Studies in New Zealand Cinema (2009), Easter Island, Myths, and Popular Culture (2011), and co-author of Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature: The Body in Parts (2017), and The Cinema of Sri Lanka: South Asian Film in Texts and Contexts (2018).

He is an author, editor or co-editor of a further thirteen books, including New Zealand Filmmakers (2007), Contemporary New Zealand Cinema (2008), The Cinema of New Zealand (in Polish, 2009), and Rapa Nui - Easter Island: Cultural and Historical Perspectives (2016). He has contributed to more than 50 books and journals, and his work has been translated into French, German, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Hungarian, and Hebrew.