From 2009-2014 she acted as the administration and organisational assistant for Cologne University’s Dr. R. Marika Visiting Chair of Australian and Indigenous Studies. In 2014, she was granted a DAAD scholarship to conduct research on her PhD project at Monash University.

Victoria has guest edited the genderforum issue ‘Gender Down Under’ and has published several articles on Indigenous Australian Writing and Film. Her research interests include Australian Literature and Film, Post-Colonial Theory, Migration and Refugee Studies, Film Theory, Popular Culture and Psychoanalytic Theory. She is on the Executive of the International Australian Studies Association.

Her thesis was published as Consuming Whiteness. Australian Racism and the ›White Sugar‹ Campaign and examines the entanglement of the political history of Australian nation building with economic, cultural, and social processes and investigates the mechanism of inclusion/exclusion and questions of socio-political organisation in the settler society, with a particular interest in the role of mass media and popular culture in the everyday (re)production of ideology. From 2014 to 2017 she taught at the Leuphana University, Lüneburg, with multiple courses on ›Stereotyping Down Under‹: Class, Gender, Nation and Race in (Post)Colonial Australia, and also on Australian aspects of the ›Intersectionality of Gender and Race in the Discourse of Simianization‹, and ›Social Documentary Photography‹. Currently, she is a Research Fellow at the Heidelberg University, Transcultural Studies, with a post-doc project about multiculturality and racist conflict in north-western Australia: ›Exception or Exemption? The Broome Pearling Industry and the White Australia Policy‹. She is has published several articles on Australian racisms, the question of scientific racism against Indigenous Australians, and consumerism and racism; for instance in her latest publication ›Buy White – Stay Fair. Racist Political Consumerism Down Under‹, in: Oxford Handbook for Political Consumerism, ed. by Magnus Boström, Michele Micheletti and Peter Oosterveer. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019.  More information on her research and publications can be found here. Individial homepage: stefanieaffeldt.net

She completed her Master of Education (English, Physical Education) at the University of Cologne and the German Sports University Cologne in 2016. Subsequently, she was awarded a six-month scholarship for preparing an English Studies doctoral project before becoming a full-time PhD scholarship holder at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne. She paused her scholarship and later continued in part-time after having her first child in late 2019.

Her thesis (successfully defended in September 2021) is entitled “The Negotiation of Im/Mobilities in Contemporary Anglophone Māori Short Fiction”. In the course of her academic career, she has spent several shorter periods in the Pacific region for research purposes and to attend a number of interdisciplinary conferences. Thus far, she has published on Māori texts (ranging from short stories to a novella, novel and poem) written in English and on literary research ethics. She first established connections to Australia in her work in 2019, when she presented on Māori literary references to the continent at a trilateral workshop at the ANU in Canberra alongside other CAS members. She recently focused on Australian refugee poetry in a paper presented at the 17^th biennial GASt conference “Australian Seascapes” (Sep 2021). Leonie’s research interests include Indigenous and postcolonial theories, Pacific literatures and networks, mobility studies, memory studies, and nuclear narrations.