Learning and using English is something I have always enjoyed in contexts that include popular culture, academia, and, of course, language for its own sake. My efforts to teach English with that same enthusiasm have been humble but honest. I started out as a freelance English language teacher and worked with a variety of different learners in very diverse settings. Among them were business and medical professionals, school children and retirees, and anyone interested in improving their English.

Most of the teaching I do now at the University of Klagenfurt revolves around English language proficiency and academic writing, where there is a strong focus on lexical development and grammatical accuracy, but also on critical language awareness and mindful language use. Language, after all, plays a powerful role both in perpetuating harmful cultural myths, and in fostering social change by creating more compassionate, egalitarian, or sustainable realities.

My interests include American Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Global Citizenship Education, and Critical Animal Studies. Courses I have taught in these areas have covered topics like muckraking journalism and social change, intersecting axes of privilege and oppression, ideologies of othering, social change through global citizenship, human-animal relationships in western societies, the construction of speciesism, the joint oppression of humans and other animals in the animal-industrial complex, and representations/realities of “meat” production and consumption including the adverse implications for humans, other animals, and ecosystems.

In the introduction to our website, Blake expressed very beautifully that we both love what we do, even if things are sometimes blurry, and, for the most part, precisely because they are. There are so many daily opportunities to learn new things about the English language, and the world of knowledge it makes accessible. Studying and teaching English allows me to question how I have been taught to see the world and to challenge what seems normal and “just the way things are.”