Since publishing my book on the poetry of the ‘Sturm-und-Drang' author Lenz, I have been interested in the socio-political and literary evolution of ideas and structures in German poetry, drama and narrative prose of the 18th and 19th centuries. My PhD on Karl Gutzkow and my involvement in the editing of one volume of the 'Schiller-Nationalausgabe' and in the theory of scholarly editing helped to create the hybrid edition of the complete works of Karl Gutzkow, an international project of which I have been co-director since 1997.

One of my long-term interests is the development of prose writing. Examining different theoretical approaches to narratology and challenging them with a more historically based model has given me a good basis for understanding novels, novellas and shorter pieces of prose from the 18th century to the present. I am currently working on a monograph about less well known prose writing of the mid-19th century, an effort to partly re-write our concepts of German Realism since the 1840s.

My current research project investigates the Chinese foreign relations with the third world countries, especially the Middle Eastern countries during the 1950s and 60s. It intends to understand how Chinese internationalist vision was articulated through its interactions with the Third-World states and it was responded to by them. It also aims to show that the Chinese interpretation of the “three worlds thesis” (sange shijie lilun) is associated with the Chinese own revolutionary experience and the Chinese Communist Party’s understanding of “national question”, which differs significantly from both the Soviet reading of the same term and the American narrative of “national self-determination” coined by Woodrow Wilson.