I am currently a Lecturer in Management at Kent Business School, University of Kent. My research interests lie within tourism, development, tourism SMEs, post-conflict tourism, and power, structure and agency within tourism development.

I finished my PhD in Management at Kent Business School at The University of Kent, UK, supervised by Dr Mark P. Hampton, Dr Krystin Zigan & Dr Carmen Stoian.

My Thesis is titled: The Political Economy of Backpacker Tourism Consumption and Production in Colombia. 

Thesis Summary: The PhD looks at how tourism development transforms rural communities in Less Developed Countries and integrates them into the global production cycle. It analyses the business development in the communities, and the underlying power structures and actors affecting this development. It suggests a new political economy-based framework for the analysis, which includes the businesses, the tourists, and the political actors in one study, using qualitative methods for the data collection. The study is based on extensive fieldwork in two case study locations in Colombia.

I also teach seminars at Kent Business School in International Business & Strategy, teach online in the Higher Degree Apprenticeship scheme, and have given a guest lecture on Tourism Development in Colombia in the Tourism in Developing Countries module, as well as co-supervised a field trip with tourism students to Greece. I have been nominated for a Kent Union Teaching Award in 2016, and my students describe me in their feedback as helpful, enthusiastic and sometimes even funny. My teaching approach is to be an inspiring and approachable lecturer that enables students to think critically and ask questions.

Prior to the PhD, I studied a Master of Arts in Tourism, Environment & Development at the Department of Geography at King’s College London.

My Dissertation revolved around the creation of a backpacker tourism enclave and is titled “The Creation of a Space of Consumption in Backpacker Tourism: A Case Study from the Colombian Caribbean Coast” (marked with Distinction).

As an undergraduate degree, I studied Business Administration with a focus on Marketing, Sports and Events Management at a small university in Eastern Germany. I went to school in my home town in Eastern Germany, but also spend a year as an exchange student at a high school in Texas when I was 16.

I also possess a total of over 5 years of industry experience in advertising as an account manager, in marketing of a travel company, in events management, and in sports management. I can conduct research, teaching, workshops and keynotes in English, German and Spanish.

Personally, I am very much interested in travelling (all 7 continents visited), reading, photography, sustainable living, music, and sports and dancing. I am excited by maps, cats (& dogs & bunnies), good food, and quirky stationary. I am a curious person and always keen on learning new things, be it a new language (I have learnt 5 so far, but only speak 3 fluently at the moment) or a new skill. I also love to teach people things, not only my students, but also cooking recipes to my friends or a few words of English to my mum. Things I plan on learning in the next couple of years are: speaking Italian fluently, programming, teaching with technology, playing electric guitar, and how to pronounce “squirrel” without my German accent coming through.

You can request my full CV here.