Jan Alber
is Professor and Chair of New English and American Literature at JLU Giessen and one of the past presidents of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN). He is the author of Narrating the Prison (2007) and Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (2016). Alber received fellowships and research grants from the British Academy, the Exploratory Research Space (ERS) at RWTH Aachen University, the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Humboldt Foundation, and the Ministry for Culture and Education of North Rhine-Westphalia. He was a Visiting Scholar at Ohio State University, the University of North Carolina (Greensboro), and the University of Maryland (College Park), as well as a Marie-Curie Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (Denmark).
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 scandalous fiction, and covers 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 to the 21st century. In 2023, she was an Affiliate at the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University, and a Fellow at Graz University in 2024.
Jessica Jumpertz
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 English 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.
is a general internist and literary scholar and one of the founders of the field of narrative medicine. She completed the MD at Harvard and the PhD in English at Columbia. She is the Bernard Schoenberg Professor of Social Medicine, Professor of Medicine, and founding chair of the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia. Her research in narrative medicine has been supported by the NIH, the NEH, and many private foundations. She authored, co-authored, or co-edited four books on narrative medicine. Charon lectures and teaches internationally and publishes in leading medical and literary journals.
James Phelan
is Distinguished University Professor of English at Ohio State University, and the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of over twenty books, including Somebody Telling Somebody Else (2017) and Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx (2023). He has been editor of Narrative, the journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN), since 1993, and co-editor of the book series on “The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative” at The Ohio State University Press since 1994. Phelan has devoted most of his research to exploring the consequences of conceiving of narrative as rhetoric. The essay in this volume is part of a book-in-progress about a rhetorical approach to fictionality.
Hanna Meretoja
is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku, and she runs the research project Counter-Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency (Academy of Finland, 2023–2027). Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). She has co-edited The Use and Abuse of Stories: New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics (Oxford University Press, 2023), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (Routledge, 2020), and Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (Routledge, 2018).
Jarmila Mildorf
teaches English language and literature at Paderborn University. Her research interests are in the fields of socionarratology, autobiography, second-person narration, audionarratology, radio drama, fictionality, dialogue, and the medical humanities. She is the author of Storying Domestic Violence: Constructions and Stereotypes of Abuse in the Discourse of General Practitioners (University of Nebraska Press, 2007) and Life Storying in Oral History: Fictional Contamination
Molly Andrews
is Honorary Professor of Political Psychology at the Social Research Institute, University College London, and the co-director of the Association of Narrative Research and Practice. She currently holds a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship for her project “A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Personal Narratives and Scholarship.” She has been Writing Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies (2022), and in 2019–2020, she was the Jane and Aatos Professor in Studies on Contemporary Society at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her books include Lifetimes of Commitment: Aging, Politics, Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Mark Freeman
is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society in the Department of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross, and the author of numerous works, including Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (Routledge, 1993); Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward (Oxford University Press, 2009); Do I Look at You with Love? Reimagining the Story of Dementia (Brill 2021); and, most recently, Toward the Psychological Humanities: A Modest Manifesto for the Future of Psychology (Routledge, 2024). Along with Hanna Meretoja, he has also co-edited the recently published The Use and Abuse of Stories: New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics (Oxford University Press 2023) and serves as editor for the Oxford University Press series “Explorations in Narrative Psychology.”
Monika Pietrzak-Franger
is Professor of British Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her areas of research range from Medical Humanities, adaptation and transmediality to (neo-)Victorian studies. Her thematically-related publications include, as author, Syphilis in Victorian Literature (2017), as editor, Women, Beauty and Fashion (2014), and as co-editor, special issues: Transforming Medical Humanities (2023), Disease, Communication and the Ethics of Invisibility (2014), and Literature and Medicine (2024). Currently, she co-leads an interuniversity cluster on “Post-Covid-19 Care” and a citizen-science project on patient self-representation. She works on temporalities and iconographies of illness.
is Professor for British and Anglophone Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. His research fields include border studies, particularly representations of the Partition of India and the Medical Humanities. His Habilitation discusses the temporality of narratives in times of crisis, particularly the experience of existential waiting. He also published anthologies on Well-Being (Brill, 2021), Narrative and Mental Health (Oxford University Press, 2023) and the Heritage of Psychiatry (Brill, forthcoming). Singer is one of the series editors of the book-series Narratives and Mental Health (Brill).
Marina Grishakova
is Chair Professor of Literary Theory and Intermedial Studies at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Her research interests include literature and philosophy, narratology, film, and the semiotics of culture. Among her most important publications are the monograph The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction (OAPEN, 2012) and the co-edited volumes Intermediality and Storytelling (De Gruyter, 2010), Theoretical Schools and Circles in the 20th-century Humanities: Literary Theory, History, Philosophy (Routledge, 2015), Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and The Gesamtkunstwerk as a Synergy of the Arts (Peter Lang, 2020).
Birgit Neumann
is Chair of Anglophone Literatures and Translation Studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf; she is founder and director of the Centre for Translation Studies. She previously held positions at the Universities of Giessen and Passau and was Visiting Professor at the Universities of Cornell (USA), Madison-Wisconsin (USA), Anglia Ruskin, Cambridge (UK), and KU Leuven (Belgium). Neumann is a member of a number of international research networks. She is co-editor of book series on cultural memory (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht), on literary and cultural translation (Transfer, Narr), and on English and American literatures (Brill). Her research engages with the poetics and politics of Anglophone literatures, world literatures, postcolonial studies, intermediality, memory studies, and cultural translation.
Ansgar Nünning
is Professor of English and American Literature and Cultural Studies and founding director of the “International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture” (GCSC), funded by the Excellence Initiative and inaugurated in 2006, at JLU Giessen, as well as of the International PhD-Programme (IPP) and the European
Vera Nünning
is Professor of English Philology at Heidelberg University, where she also served as vice-rector for international affairs. She has published books on eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century British literature, and (co-)edited 25 volumes on contemporary literature and narrative theory. Her articles deal with narrative theory, gender studies, cultural studies, and British fiction from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Her book Reading Fictions, Changing Minds appeared in 2014. She was a fellow in two Institutes of Advanced Studies and is associate editor of three book series. She is currently co-editing The Palgrave Handbook of Feminist, Queer and Trans Narrative Studies.