Angela was born in Hamburg (Germany) and grew up with a Hanseatic love for water coming from all sides. She completed a five-year MA degree in English, Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Osnabrück in the year 2002, including two years of non-degree BA studies taking courses in creative writing, anglophone studies, and philosophy of science at the University of Victoria (British Columbia). Angela has more than 20 years of interdisciplinary international research experience through her PhD in Comparative Literature (University of Auckland, New Zealand; 2011) and postdoctoral research in Sociology of Translation and Intercultural Germanic Studies (University of Gothenburg, Sweden; 2013-2017). Her major areas of work intersect the streams of creative nonfiction; multimodal sociology & translation; and conceptual embodied metaphor approaches to knowledge transfer (environmental ethico-onto-epistem-ological processes).

Angela had the great privilege to receive her first teaching assignments in higher education in an environment which has begun to acknowledge the long, authentic, and material cultural histories of Pacific Island peoples. Learning in the Pasifik way is inclusive and holistic: stewarding nature, participating in community and valuing the interpersonal relationships. It compliments learning in the European tradition that beliefs in logic, productivity, and personal autonomy. The relationship between these traditions is not a perfect balance of ideas and identity. Rather its purpose is to challenge entropic views of cultural and disciplinary mediation and exchange. In her classrooms she likes to mix up her materials and activities in response to the particular academic, cultural and social needs of her students. She relies on her ability to organise and prioritise particular learning goals but also on her intuition as to when to push her students and when to let them loose in order for them to develop the when, whats and whys that will allow them do develop the skills to navigate their critical literary and translation studies further beyond her teaching.