Authors
Fernanda Alfieri
is Assistant Professor in Early Modern History at the University of Bologna. Her research, which began at the Italian-German Historical Institute of the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento, explores the history of marriage and sexuality and the relationship between science and religion. Her publications include Nella camera degli sposi. Tomás Sánchez, il matrimonio, la sessualità (secoli XVI–XVII) (il Mulino, 2010); with T. Jinno, Christianity and Violence in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Perspectives from Europe and Japan, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2021; and Veronica e il diavolo. Storia di un esorcismo a Roma, Einaudi, 2021 (German edition, wbg, 2023; Spanish edition, Cuatro Lunas, 2024).
Anne Enderwitz
is Professor of English Literature at Humboldt Universität in Berlin. Her research interests range from early modern theatre to contemporary fiction and from the relation between literature and economics to questions of ecology, climate and future. She also has a special interest in love and desire in the early modern age. Her latest book explores how theatre negotiates economic discourses and practices on household and market. It is entitled Economies of Early Modern Drama: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Virginie Gouverneur
is Associate Professor at the Université de Haute-Alsace and a member of the Bureau d’économie théorique et appliquée (BETA). After defending her doctoral thesis in economics in 2013 at Université Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis, she was a post-doctoral researcher at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her work focuses on the history of British economic and philosophical thought on gender inequality in the 19th and early 20th centuries. She has published several articles on the subject, notably in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought (EJHET) and History of Political Economy (HOPE), as well as a book chapter in the Routledge Handbook of the History of Women’s Economic Thought.
Katja Hettich
is a literary and media scholar based at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, where she co-coordinates the Franco-German study program “European Media Culture”. Her research explores affect, aesthetics, and cultural knowledge in film, literature, and other media, with a particular focus on European contexts. Her areas of specialization include transmedial genre theory, narratology, and the phenomenology of media reception. Her forthcoming book Affektive Leerstellen. Emotionale Perspektivierung im ‘wissenschaftlichen’ Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts (De Gruyter) proposes a model for analysing the affective dynamics of reader engagement in literary narratives and examines how novels by Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers and Zola invite specific affective and epistemic stances toward fictional characters and their experiences.
Agnieszka Komorowska
is Full Professor of Romance Literature at the Institute of Romance Studies at the University of Kassel. In 2021, she completed her habilitation at the University of Mannheim with a thesis on economics, politics, and gender in the representation of friendship in 17th-century Spanish theater. She completed her doctorate with a book on the poetics of shame in French literature and French thought in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her research focuses on literature and economy, Spanish theater and narratives of the 17th and 18th centuries, literary emotions, especially shame and autofiction, and poetics of the house in contemporary Caribbean and Latin American literature. Current book publications: Transkulturationen des Pikaresken in den romanischsprachigen Literaturen Afrikas und Lateinamerikas, Heidelberg: Winter, 2025, together with Susanne Goumegou and Sebastian Thies; Fe/male Friends: Staging Gender and Friendship in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature, Frankfurt am Main/Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana, together with Claudia Gronemann, 2023, Poetiken des Scheiterns. Formen und Funktionen unökonomischen Erzählens, Fink: Paderborn, 2018, together with Annika Nickenig.
Marie-Laure Massei-Chamayou
is a Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne, a member of the Centre d’Histoire du XIXe Siècle (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne / Sorbonne Université), and a Jane Austen scholar. Her research lies at the intersection of literature and economics, with particular emphasis on the representation of money, inheritance, and social change in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s writing. She is the author of two monographs – La Représentation de l’argent dans les romans de Jane Austen: L’Être et l’avoir (2012) and Between Secrets and Screens: Sentiments under Scrutiny (2015) – and has contributed numerous articles on Austen and her contemporaries, including Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. She has also written prefaces for the recent French translations of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion published by Gallmeister. Since June 2025, she has served as co-president of the newly established Société Jane Austen in France.
Annika Nickenig
holds the position of Guest Professor for French and Spanish literature at the Institute for Romance Philology at Freie Universität Berlin. Her habilitation thesis analyses early modern economies of narration. Further research focuses on rhetoric and material culture and on the relationship between literature and sciences. Publications include Inscribing Love. The Materiality of Affects in a Global Perspective (forthcoming 2026) ed. with Jenny Körber and Dinge – Gaben – Waren. Der Gegenstand ökonomischen Handelns in den romanischen Literaturen (2022), edited with Urs Urban.
Esther Schomacher
currently holds the position of Guest Professor for Italian Literature at the Institute for Romance Languages and Literatures at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Previously, she worked as an associate professor for Italian Literature at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and for Cultural Studies and Cultural Analysis at Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen. Her research focuses on relations between literature and sciences, especially economics, media theory, political theory, and historical Gender Studies. Previous publications include The Culture of Money (edited with Jan Söffner, Routledge, 2024), Italian Theory (edited with Antonio Lucci and Jan Söffner, Merve, 2021), and Schrift und Geld um 1900. Italo Svevo’s Medien (Writing and Money around 1900. Italo Svevo’s Media, Fink, 2021).
Beatrice Schuchardt
has been Full Professor of Hispanic and Francophone Cultural Studies and Literature at the University of Regensburg since October 2024. Previously, she was a visiting professor at the universities of Wuppertal, Freiburg, and Dresden. In 2022, she received the “Award for Diversity-Sensitive Teaching” at the Technical University of Dresden, where she also directed the Center France | Francophonie. Her habilitation-thesis Die Anthropologisierung des Ökonomischen (The Humanization of Economy, Vervuert, 2023) on how 18th-century Bourbon Political Economy was taught to the Spanish people through male and female economic types like the vir oeconomicus or the femina oecomica that were staged by sentimental comedies of the time, was awarded the 2021 prize by the University Society of Münster. Her doctoral thesis Schreiben auf der Grenze (Writing on the Border, Boehlau, 2006) examined postcolonial representations of history operating through images, painting, and photography in the French-language novels of Algerian writer and historian Assia Djebar. Her other areas of research include the transformations of the novel in the post-digital age in France, Spain, and Latin America, and displacement in Francophone and Spanish-language literature comics.
Urs Urban
is a research assistant at Bauhaus University in Weimar and an associate professor at Humboldt University in Berlin. He studied romance philology at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and at the University of Vienna and did his PhD-thesis on Jean Genet at the University of Treves. He then worked for years as a DAAD-lecturer abroad, first in Strasburg, then in Buenos Aires, where he was head of the DAAD-office. In 2023, he obtained his postdoctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation) at Humboldt University in Berlin; then he worked as a deputy professor in Berlin and Freiburg. Works and publishes on the economics of literature (amongst others, Konflikt und Vermittlung. Die Ökonomie des Romans in der Frühen Neuzeit, Brill: Fink 2024) as well as, currently, on Black Paris and Afrolatinoamerica.
Jan-Henrik Witthaus
is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at the University of Kassel, Germany. His research centres on representations of social worlds in contemporary Latin-American novels, the representation of power in the Dictator Novel, as well as the literature and culture of the Enlightenment in Spain and France. Publications available in English are: “Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos”, in: Rafael Domingo Osle/Javier Martínez-Torrón (eds.): Great Christian Jurists in Spanish History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017), “The Homo Oeonomicus, Merchant Ethos, and Liberalism in Spain under Enlightened Absolutism”, in: Christoph Lütge/Christoph Strosetzki (eds.): The Honorable Merchant – Between Modesty and Risk- Taking (Basle: Springer Nature Switzerland 2019).