My research interests lie in the area of Literature and Culture of the German-speaking countries. More specifically, I am interested in the ways in which issues concerning national and cultural identity are reflected in contemporary literature and, in relation to this, how intertextual devices in the context of postmodernism challenge such issues. This work focuses on the one hand on re-workings of national myths and aims to analyse the ways in which such myths have been used in the construction of identities over time. On the other hand the transformation of genres such as crime and detective fiction and its relation to a questioning of identities plays a major part in my research. In both cases, I favour a comparative approach from a European perspective. Another part of my research activity concerns literature of German Romanticism, especially word and image relations in the romantic novel. Upon my arrival at the University of Limerick, I joined the Centre for Irish-German Studies, which enabled me to further refine my comparative work on identity issues with a particular focus on Ireland.