Simona Adinolfi
is a PhD student at Ghent University. Her PhD project examines contemporary novels of migration using a critical posthumanities framework, to show how canonical themes usually associated to narratives of migration are being subverted and complicated on a formal level. Her research interests include narrative theory, the critical posthumanities, migration studies, questions of memory and narrative identity.
Daria Baryshnikova
recently finished her PhD dissertation at RWTH Aachen University (Germany), in which she investigated the specificity of cut-up-narratives within the different cultural contexts. Her focus is on the representation of mind and mind processes in cut-up-literature. She graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow, Russia). In 2005, she defended her candidate dissertation in the field of history of culture. Since then, she worked as a lecturer at the Russian State University for the Humanities and the University of Witten/Herdecke, as an editor at the art-magazine “Iskusstvo” (Moscow) and as a research assistant at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Moscow).
Marzia Beltrami
is currently Postdoctoral Researcher in Contemporary Italian Literature at IULM University, Milan. She also held positions as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Comparative Literature at the University of Tartu, where she was part of the Narrative Culture Cognition research group, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Medical Humanities in Context Lab (MHiC-Lab) at Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. Her research interests lie in cognitive narratology and the interrelations between narrative and science, with special attention to embodiment, its thematic representations and implications for narrative reception. Her recently completed project focused on the ethical underpinnings of representations of impossible bodies and minds in speculative literature: on this broader topic, she is co-editor of a special issue for ‘Marvels & Tales’ on Literary Fairy Tales and the Embodied Mind (2023), and author of several articles on Primo Levi’s and Italo Calvino’s science fiction, as well as on A.S. Byatt’s fairy tales. Her monograph Spatial Plots. Virtuality and the Embodied Mind in Baricco, Camilleri and Calvino (Legenda, 2021) explores the role of spatiality in narrative comprehension
is a PhD researcher at the University of Antwerp and Ghent University, working on the intersections of literary studies, (trans)gender studies and queer studies. His dissertation project as an FWO fellow is called ‘Born in the Wrong Story: An Embodied Approach to Transgender Narratives in Dutch Literary Fiction’. In a corpus of modern and contemporary Dutch novels, he investigates how various transgender embodiments, trajectories and experiences emerge through literary techniques, such as metaphors, temporal ordering and narrative voice. In the Spring of 2023, he was a Fulbright visiting student researcher at California State University Long Beach.
Laura de la Parra Fernández
is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Complutense University of Madrid, where she serves as Academic Coordinator of the MA in North American Studies. She has been a visiting scholar at Birkbeck College, University of London, at Harvard University, and at Project Narrative, Ohio State University, thanks to a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research focuses on Modern and Contemporary British and American literature by women, life writing, affect theory, and the medical humanities.
Carolin Gebauer
is a lecturer of English literature and culture at the University of Wuppertal and a postdoctoral researcher at Wuppertal’s Center for Narrative Research. She is part of the Horizon 2020 project “Crises as OPPORTUNITIES”, funded by the European Union, which explores representations of migration in the European public sphere, and a member of the executive team of DIEGESIS, a bilingual interdisciplinary e-journal for narrative research. Her monograph Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel (De Gruyter 2021) received the ESSE Book Award for Junior Scholars in the Field of Literatures in the English Language 2022 as well as the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize 2023 of the International Society for the Study of Narrative.
Liselotte Van der Gucht
is a research fellow of the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) affiliated with the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. She investigates German/Austrian 19th, 20th, and 21st-century literature by female authors through the lense of neurodiversity, aiming to investigate how non-normative cognition can be experienced and expressed in literary texts. Her most recent publications include a chapter on hypersensitivity as empathy in Marlen Haushofer’s autobiographical novel Nowhere ending sky (in Orbis Litterarum 2023) and an opinion piece on neuronormativity in De Reactor (in Dutch).
is a research and teaching assistant at RWTH Aachen University. She is currently completing her PhD-thesis on the representation and negotiation of highly intelligent female characters in literature from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. In her research, Jessica Jumpertz combines cognitive literary studies and feminist narratology to examine the character construction of brilliant female characters and their effects. She has published articles in the research areas of cognitive narratology and the empirical study of literature, but her research interests further encompass cultural studies, feminist literary criticism, narrative theory, and approaches in first and second generation cognitive literary studies.
Gunther Martens
is a Professor of German Literature and a member of the Literature Department at Ghent University. He is also a member of the Centre for the Study of Experimental Literature and the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities. His research interests include disability studies, neurophenomenology, and rhetorical narratology. He is currently leading a research project titled “Exquisite defects. Detoxing the female literary genius at the crossroads of critical disability studies and neurophenomenology”. He has published several articles and papers on topics related to his research interests, including a recent paper on neurodiversity in Ingeborg Bachmann’s work.
Sandra Marzinkowski
(Ruhr Universität Bochum) holds a B.A. in English/American Studies and Romance Studies (French) and an M.A. in English and American Studies. Her main research interests include queer studies, gender studies, narratology, embodied cognition, phenomenology, affect studies, and critical psychiatry. In her M.A. thesis, she investigated fiction centring around characters whose perception is coded as pathological. Her PhD project builds upon this framework to explore textual (in-/re-)validation strategies as connected with hystericizable femininities as well as the entanglement of deep and surface reading strategies with the (de-)legitimisation of gendered violence and identity materialisation processes in the context of historical fiction.
Deborah de Muijnck
is a postdoctoral researcher and academic coordinator of the European PhD Network “Literary and Cultural Studies” at the GCSC, JLU Giessen. She finished her dissertation on cognitive narratological approaches toward post-trauma storytelling at RWTH Aachen University’s English Department in 2022. Her research focuses on the medical humanities, (cognitive and embodied) narratology, and on the reciprocal influence of culture, narration and non-normative life-experiences in literature. Her second monograph explores literary scandals as forms of cultural transgression in British and Irish Literature from the 18th–21st century. In 2023, she was an affiliate at the Institute for World Literature, Harvard University, and a fellow at Graz University’s Centre for Cultural Studies in 2024.
Elizabeth Oakes
is a salaried doctoral researcher in the English unit at the University of Helsinki. Their dissertation project researches representations of altered consciousness in American science fiction, 1960 to 1979. They use computational methodologies in a stylistic framework to characterise styles of representing altered consciousness in a corpus of science fiction novels. They demonstrate how the fine-grained aspects of these styles generate themes, and how the themes in turn shape and are shaped by contemporaneous socio-cultural currents. They also pursue research interests in the trans-medial formal aspects of impossibilities in new weird novels and comics. They have published on these subjects in Linguistics Vanguard and Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, where they currently serve as Editor-in-Chief.
Ellen Peel
is Professor Emerita in the Department of Humanities and Comparative World Literature and the Department of English at San Francisco State University, who specialises in fiction written in English, French, and German. The author of Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction, she has published on women’s literature, science fiction and utopian literature, and literary theory, especially about “unnatural” narrative, reader response, and feminism. Ellen Peel’s contribution to this volume is her larger project on “Frankengenre”, which examines narratives about the physical and mental construction of human bodies.
Ralf Schneider
is Professor and Chair of English Literature at RWTH Aachen University, and co-founder of the Aachen Center for Cognitive and Empirical Literary Studies (ACCELS). His research and publications cover several areas of British literary and cultural studies, including the relationship between literature and war, literary representations of masculinities, migration and literature, as well as literary constructions of childhood. The main areas of his research, however, have been cognitive narratology and the study of cognitive and emotional processes of response to literature, with a focus on readers’ reactions to literary characters.
is currently pursuing their doctoral degree in North American Literature and Culture at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Their scholarly pursuits center around the realm of trans speculative future fictions, delving deep into how these narratives envision realms beyond the constraints of the cisgender binary. Their dissertation project explores the ways in which such stories shape our understanding of potential futures, particularly concerning notions of ecology, race, identity, and agency. Kit Schuster’s research is funded by a Rosa Luxemburg Foundation scholarship. They are currently holding a fellowship position at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
Anke Sharma
is an independent researcher based in Berlin, Germany. Currently, she is working on turning her doctoral thesis on we-narration in post-1968 American literature into a monograph for publication. Anke earned her doctorate through the interdisciplinary program offered by the Graduate School of North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her contribution to this volume was written while receiving funding from Freie Universität Berlin. Before entering the PhD program, she was awarded an M.A. in North American Studies from Freie Universität Berlin and a B.A. in American Studies and Business Administration from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her work experience includes roles at McDaniel College (Maryland, USA), at Bard College Berlin and at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research interests focus on the tensions between narration and authorship, postcolonial and decolonial embodiment, and queer forms in American literature.
Christina Slopek-Hauff
is a doctoral student at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, where she also works as research assistant and lecturer in the section of Anglophone Literatures/Literary Translation. Her research interests include medical humanities, queer and gender studies, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism. So far, she has published on these topics in Anglia, Gender Forum and Storyworlds. Together with Miriam Hinz, Christina Slopek-Hauff is also engaged in editing a volume on “Participation in Postcolonial Wor(l)ds”.
Jakob Summerer
is currently an Ussher-funded PhD researcher at Trinity College Dublin and part-time lecturer at Maynooth University in Ireland. In the past he taught classes in cultural and literary studies, narratology, and linguistics at University College Freiburg (Germany) and Galway University (Ireland). In his current research, he is focussing on metaphor use in German-language memoirs written
Teresa Turnbull
is a research and teaching assistant at RWTH Aachen University. Her project concerns the representation of impossible bodies in 21st century speculative literature. Using unnatural narratology, blending theory, gender, and genre theory, she aims at examining reading strategies used by the reader to understand impossible bodies as well as the effects of representing female gendered bodily transformations. Her further research interests include disability studies, gothic literature, and cultural studies. She has recently published an article on “Reading Bodies as Space in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’” (2023).
Xinran Yang
is an associate professor of Linguistics and English Language/Literature at Beijing International Studies University, China, where she teaches courses including pragmatics, discourse analysis, academic writing, etc. Her major research interests include stylistics, cognitive poetics, narratology, and discourse analysis. She is the author of A Poetics of Minds and Madness: Fiction, Cognition and Interpretation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), and her publications include stylistic analysis of literary texts, cognitive poetic studies, cognitive narrative studies, and academic writing.
Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen
is a professor at Aarhus University. His research has attempted to contribute to conversations about mainly three areas of narrative theory: first person narration, unnatural narratology, and fictionality. His current project is on human sexuality and the roles of imagination and fictionality in human sexual practices and preferences. Publications in English include “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction” Narrative (2004), A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, co-edited with Jan Alber and Brian Richardson, (Ohio State University Press, 2013), and “Ten Theses about Fictionality” with James Phelan and Richard Walsh (in Narrative January 2015). Fiktionalitet (2013) won the prize as Danish textbook of the year across disciplines awarded by Samfundslitteratur. Fictionality and Literature – Core Concepts Revisited (edited with James Phelan et al) came out at OSU Press 2023. He heads the research group Narrative Research Lab and the “Centre for Fictionality Studies”.