Over 35 years of teaching at three different universities—spanning 70 semesters—I have taught roughly 250 seminars. My courses ranged widely across periods, languages, and media. In German children’s literature, I worked with authors from Joachim Heinrich Campe and Wilhelm Busch to Erich Kästner, Paul Maar, and Kirsten Boie. In Anglophone literature and culture, my teaching extended from Chaucer to Oscar Wilde, Gilbert & Sullivan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and J. K. Rowling. Alongside author-based seminars, I repeatedly explored broader literary questions, including satire and humour, autobiography, multimodality in picturebooks, and transmediality, particularly in relation to writers such as Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll. Throughout my teaching career, I returned again and again to translation, image studies, and comparative literature as central perspectives.
All seminars were guided by the principle of giving students as much freedom as possible within the seminar context in selecting materials and choosing how to work both collaboratively and individually. This principle led to project-based courses, most often taught within Leuphana University’s Komplementärstudium. They brought together students from all faculties, creating a particularly stimulating mix of disciplinary perspectives. Each course culminated in the preparation of a public event co-hosted with the Literaturbüro in the historic Heinrich Heine House in Lüneburg.
Built in the 15th century, the three-storey building offers a wide range of spaces, from a large stone-paved entrance hall with an overlooking gallery to an outdoor courtyard and rooms of various sizes. This diversity of spaces allowed students to develop a wide range of different presentation forms and activities such as exhibitions and installations, dramatic and musical performances, readings, as well as elements of entertainment, food and drink, and a variety of interactive activities. The project seminars included bLümsday (Bloomsday in Lüneburg), Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter 21 – which broke all records in visitor numbers and even reached the front page of the local newspaper – and Gatsby 100, celebrating the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel.