After her degree, she obtained her PhD on transcultural, contemporary literatures at the University of Bremen, where she went on to complete her habilitation in 2018 on the topic of a postcolonial rereading of the French Enlightenment. Struve was a research assistant within the “Anxiety Culture” project at CAU Kiel and Columbia University and stand-in professor of French literature and cultural studies at TU Dresden.

Her more recent research focuses on narration of fear in French-speaking, contemporary literatures, addresses issues of applied literary studies, and investigates imaginations of the North in French literatures.