I am currently Head of the Department of Indology at the Asia-Orient Institute of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities as a senior academic advisor and adjunct professor.

I studied Indology and Ethnology (previously German Studies, Art History and Empirical Cultural Studies) in Tübingen and completed my doctorate in Würzburg with a thesis on the South Indian Sanskrit theater tradition Kūṭiyāṭṭṭam (Ernst Waldschmidt Prize 2008). Back in Tübingen, I completed my habilitation in May 2013 and received the “venia legendi” for Indology; in December 2016, I was then appointed adjunct professor.

Parallel and closely intertwined with my academic career, I studied Kūṭiyāṭṭṭam Sanskrit theater in theory and practice at the South Indian dance theater academy Kerala Kalamandalam from 1995 to 2001 and learned the Malayalam language. My main focus was on the development of actresses and female role characters and expanded to gender studies in South Asia. These focuses are now continued by my PhD students from Kerala. I continue to perform as a Kūṭiyāṭṭṭam actress, give talks and lecture-demonstrations at universities, theaters and schools. In 2018, I was honored by the state government of Kerala as a “Scholar in Residence” as part of the “Erudite Program”, in 2019 the Indian Council of Cultural Relations awarded me the “Gisela Bonn Prize” for special achievements in the field of Indo-German relations.

I have been involved in various committees for years; I am currently the spokesperson for the “Landesvertretung Akademischer Mittelbau an den Universitäten in Baden-Württemberg”, a member of the University Council and DHV contact person at the University of Tübingen. In the five years that I held the elective office of Equal Opportunities Officer at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (2014-2019), I became directly acquainted with the variety of equality-related topics and problems in everyday university life, ranging from the lack of childcare facilities to sexual harassment, the introduction of gender-neutral toilets or the administration of travel allowances for female early career researchers to equality issues in appointment procedures. As a “first generation academic”, I would like to bring the aspect of equal opportunities and the topic of equal performance more strongly into my gender equality work at the University of Tübingen in order to find and promote “latent excellence”.

I have been an academic councilor and adjunct professor at the Methods Center of the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences since 2023, where I am responsible for the Qualitative Methods and Interpretative Social Research department.

Since my studies of Sociology, Scandinavian Studies and Gender Studies in Tübingen and at the Humboldt University of Berlin, I have been dealing with methodological questions of empirical social research as well as questions of gender sociology, related to the topics of work, organization, profession, science and technology research. This has given me an understanding of the mechanisms of gender inequality, from which the university as an organization is not exempt.

As a postdoc at the University of St. Gallen, I empirically investigated how the pursuit of excellence at Swiss and German universities is linked to efforts to increase equal opportunities: there are both synergies and areas of friction between the two concerns. In my gender equality work at the University of Tübingen, I would like to contribute to university organizational development understanding gender equality as a natural, helpful, albeit sometimes uncomfortable part of its work. We will not run out of work, because: Reforms are always incomplete.