I studied in Jena and Erlangen, completed my PhD on Uwe Johnson in 1995, and obtained my habilitation with a thesis on Goethe's Theory of Colors in 2003. As a visiting scholar, I was at Columbia University in New York in 1996 and at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. in 2008. From 2005 to 2009, I was a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Foundation at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.