Studied Czech Studies, history and philosophy in Vienna and Prague, and has been a lecturer at the Department of Slavonic Studies at Vienna University since 2003. She has written works on 19th and 20th century Czech literature, especially the unofficial literature of the 1950s, contemporary literature, authentic genres (diaries, letters, documents) and the relationship between Czech, Slovak and Austrian literature. She is the author of the monograph Total Realism and the Poetry of Embarrassment. Unofficial Czech Literature 1948-1953 (German 1998, Czech 2002). Together with Jiří Holý she published the collections Czech Baroque. Language, Literature, Culture (1999); Vyhnání, Odsun, Transfer in the Context of Czech Literature (2004), and the collection Jesuit Culture in the Czech Lands (2018) together with Stefan M. Newerkla.