Notes on Contributors
Vera Alexander
is Senior Lecturer in the Programme European Languages and Cultures at the University of Groningen, specialising in Anglophone literatures and cultures. Her publications and teaching combine and connect Anglophone postcolonial and transcultural studies, diasporic literature, ecocriticism, life writing and travel literature. She is in the process of completing a monograph (Anglophone Garden Literature: Relations, Growth and Identity Formation) which reads garden books as a form of life writing that engages with place and sustainability as well as growth and creativity.
Evelyn Dueck
is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the German Department of the University of Zurich. After a phd in Translation Studies in 2011 she worked at the Universities of Neuchâtel (Switzerland), Halle (Germany) and Philadelphia (usa). Her research was rewarded by the Mercator Prize and co-financed by grants of the University of Zurich and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her research interests include translation studies, literary theory, modern French and German poetry and literature and science. She is currently preparing her second book (habilitation) on theories of vision in the European Enlightenment from Johannes Kepler to Johann Gottfried Herder and a study on Paul Celan’s book Fadensonnen (1968).
Oliver Jahraus
is Professor of Modern German Literature and Media at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich since 2005. He studied German Language and Literature and Philosophy in Munich and handed in his doctorate thesis on Thomas Bernhard in 1992. From 1994 to 1995 he participated in a dfg project on radical avant-garde Viennese actionism. In 1996, he became a Scientific Assistant in Bamberg, 2001 habilitation with a thesis on literature as a medium (2003). From 2001 to 2014, he was co-spokesman of the doctoral college of the Hanns-Seidel-Foundation “Recognition and Design”. From 2015 to 2016, he was Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies of the lmu (Zur Medienkultur der Weimarer Republik), and in 2016/17 fellow at the Internationales Forschungskolleg Morphomata at the University of Cologne. Key publications: Die Aktion des Wiener Aktionismus (2000); Theorieschleife (2001); Martin Heidegger (2004), Amour fou (2004), Literaturtheorie (2005); Franz Kafka (2006); Uni-Wissen Germanistik. Grundkurs Literaturwissenschaft (2009); 101 wichtigste Fragen: Deutsche Literatur (2013); Das Medienabenteuer (2017); and as (co-)editor: Kafka-Handbuch (2008), Theorietheorie (2011), Luhmann-Handbuch (2012); Sache/Ding (2017).
Jason Kavett
received his Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 2017. From 2017 to 2019 he has been Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY). His areas of research include 20th century poetry and thought, translation studies, baroque drama, and relations between German, French, and English literature.
Andrea Krauss
is Professor of German at New York University. Her research interests include the intersection of literature, philosophy, and aesthetics from the eighteenth century to the present, as well as literary theory and methodology. She is the author of Zerbrechende Tradierung: Zu Kontexten des Schauspiels “IchundIch” von Else Lasker-Schüler (2002) and Lenz unter anderem: Aspekte einer Theorie der Konstellation (2011). She edited two special issues of mln (“Constellations”, 2011; “Avant-garde revisited: Else Lasker-Schüler”, 2017) and has published numerous articles on authors such as Hamann, Lessing, Lenz, Goethe, Eichendorff, Jean Paul, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Nelly Sachs, Celan, and Sebald. Her current book project explores the relation between literature and hermeneutics around 1800.
Jörg Kreienbrock
is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 2005. His research focuses on German literature from the 18th to the 21st century, with an emphasis on literary theory, poetics, contemporary literature, and the history of science. He also held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, UK, and the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna, Austria. Jörg Kreienbrock is the author of: Kleiner. Feiner. Leichter: Nuancierungen zum Werk Robert Walsers, Berlin (2010); Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the Question of Modern Literature (2012); Das Medium der Prosa: Studien zur Theorie der Lyrik (2019); and as co-editor: Die Amerikanischen Götter: Transatlantische Prozesse in der deutschsprachigen Popkultur seit 1945 (2015).
Florian Lippert
is Associate Professor of European Culture and Literature at the University of Groningen, and Expert Evaluator for the European Commission. He is the author of Selbstreferenz in Literatur und Wissenschaft. Kronauer, Grünbein, Maturana, Luhmann (Wilhelm Fink, 2013) and has published widely on modern and contemporary comparative literature and film, literary and film theory, Discourse Theory and Social Systems Theory. He received his PhD in Modern German Literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany, with a Full Scholarship by the German Research Foundation (dfg), and had lecturer positions at King’s College London, Sungshin University Seoul and the University of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe.
Kristina Mendicino
is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Humanities and German Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism (2017), as well as Announcements: On Novelty (forthcoming). She has also published articles on writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Paul Celan, Heinrich Heine, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Konstantin Mierau
is Senior Lecturer in European Languages and Cultures at the University of Groningen. Mierau applies a combination of microhistorical and empirical approaches to the study of the effects of literary representations of marginality in the Spanish-language realm. He works on both historical and contemporary literature. His areas of specialization include Mateo Alemán, Camilo José Celá and reading in prison. Key publications are Capturing the Pícaro in Words: Literary and Institutional Representations of Marginal Communities in Early Modern Madrid (2019) and “Entrevistas de galeotes: Cervantes, Alemán y la microhistoria de los marginados” (Neophilologus 2015). He currently works on an empirical study of prison reading in Latin America and is director of the academic advisory board of the conicyt project Converging Horizons: Production, Mediation, Reception and Effects of Representations of Marginality.
Barbara Naumann
is Professor of German Literature at Zurich University. She is editor in chief of the journal “Figurationen” (
Anne Rüggemeier
is currently situated at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (frias), where she works in the erc-funded project “Lists and Listmaking in Literature and Culture”. She teaches at the English Department of Freiburg University and is an associated member of the research training group Factual and Fictional Narration. Anne Rüggemeier studied Comparative Literature, English and History at Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen (Germany) and at Oxford Brookes University (UK). From 2009–2013, she held a doctorate scholarship at the Gießen Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (gcsc), where she conducted a PhD project on autobiographical writing in contemporary English Literatures (Die relationale Autobiographie, 2014). Anne Rüggemeier wrote various articles on life writing, self-reflexivity and graphic storytelling that appeared in The Journal of Comics and Graphic Novels, The Amsterdam Journal of Cultural Narratology, The European Journal of Life Writing and A/B: Auto/biography Studies. Her research interests include life writing, narratology, medical humanities, and the field of literature and knowledge.
Marcel Schmid
is Assistant Professor of German Studies at University of Virginia. He studied history, German literature, and art history at the University of Zurich. Having taught at high school for years, he returned to the University of Zurich for his graduate studies, but also went abroad to Yale and New York University. He defended his dissertation in German literature on the concept of autopoiesis in 2014. Since then, he has been a visiting scholar at Yale and Brown University, and a postdoctoral fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation. His first book Autopoiesis und Literatur was published in 2016. In the same year, he co-edited a volume on the German life reform movement. Marcel Schmid is interested in the interface of literary analysis and technology. He is currently working on a project entitled “Cultural Seriality in Times of Technological Singularity”. Since his childhood, Marcel has been interested in car culture, and he has published articles on the “Dieselgate” and autonomous driving in the newspaper “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”.
Antonius Weixler
is Senior Lecturer in Modern German Literature at Bergische Universität Wuppertal. He studied German Literature, Arts and Media Studies, and Political Science at University of Konstanz and University College Cork. His research focuses on narratology, cultural studies and the European avant-garde. He wrote his dissertation on “Transvisual Poetics” of avant-garde writer and critic Carl Einstein (Poetik des Transvisuellen. Carl Einsteins “écriture visionnaire”, 2016), has published a number of articles on the phenomenon of authenticity, and edited Authentisches Erzählen. Produktion, Narration und Rezeption eines Zuschreibungsphänomens (2012). Upcoming publications include an edited volume on prizes for literature (Literaturpreise. Geschichte und Kontexte, 2019, ed. together with Christoph Jürgensen), on the evolvement of the concept of “cultural tradition” in the 19th century (“Tradition (er)finden. Erhalten und Erneuern im Spannungsfeld von Romantik und Realismus”, published in two iasl special issues, 44/1 [June 2019] and 44/2 [November 2019], ed. together with Christoph Gardian), and on post-truth narratives (Postfaktisches Erzählen?/Post-Truth Narration?, forthcoming, ed. together with Matei Chihaia, Matías Martínez, Katharina Rennhak, Michael Scheffel and Roy Sommer).