Deborah Ascher Barnstone
is Professor and Head of Architecture at The University of Sydney. Barnstone’s primary research interests are in interrogating the origins of modernism, dismantling myths, and exploring the relationships between art, architecture, and culture more broadly. She has published widely in journals, edited volumes, and monographs including The Break with the Past: German Avant-garde Architecture, 1910–1925 (Routledge, 2018), Beyond the Bauhaus: Cultural Modernity in Weimar Breslau, 1918–1933 (University of Michigan Press, 2016), and The Color of Modernism: Paints, Pigments and the Transformation of Modern Architecture in 1920s Germany (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).
Paul Bishop
is William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages at the University of Glasgow. His research interests include Weimar Classicism, German Romanticism, and such topics in the history of ideas as psychoanalysis (Freud), analytical psychology (Jung), and biocentric metaphysics (Ludwig Klages). His most recent publications include Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life (Routledge, 2018), German Political Thought and the Discourse of Platonism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and Discourses of Philogy and Theology in Nietzsche (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). He is currently working on a four-volume project to be published by Chiron under the title Jung and the Epic of Transformation, beginning with Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Parzival” and the Grail as Transformation (Chiron, 2024).
Thorsten Carstensen
is Lecturer of German at the University of Amsterdam and specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature. He is the author of Romanisches Erzählen: Peter Handke und die epische Tradition (Wallstein, 2013) and has edited or co-edited volumes on Die Literatur der Lebensreform: Kulturkritik und Aufbruchstimmung um 1900 (with Marcel Schmid; transcript, 2016), Das Abenteuer des Gewöhnlichen: Alltag in der deutschsprachigen Literatur der Moderne (with Mattias Pirholt; Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2018), Die tägliche Schrift: Peter Handke als Leser (transcript, 2019) and Heimat in Literatur und Kultur: Neue Perspektiven (with Oliver Kohns; Brill | Fink, 2023). He has also written on Hollywood cinema and contemporary Anglophone authors such as Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee. His current book project focuses on architectural discourses in modern German and Austrian fiction.
is Professor of Modern and Contemporary English Literature at Birmingham Newman University in England. The author or editor of over twenty books, he specialises in the study of contemporary British literature and culture as well as post-colonial and twentieth-century writing. He has published widely on literature post-1900. His books include Modernism and the Post-Colonial (Continuum, 2007), Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970 (Palgrave, 2nd Edition 2012) and Modernism: The New Critical Idiom (Routledge, 3rd edition 2016).
Wenwen Guo
is Assistant Professor of English at Brenau University (USA). She earned her PhD in English at Emory University, where she also obtained a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. As a Mellon Graduate Teaching Fellow, she worked at Dillard University in New Orleans, LA. Previously, she received degrees in English from Shanghai International Studies University (m.a.) and Dong Hua University (b.a.). Her research focuses on the questions of affect, subjectivity, consciousness, and mental health, particularly the ways in which literary texts complicate existing scientific discourses. Her published work has appeared in Henry James Review, Science Fiction Studies, Modernism/modernity, and Cross Current, among others.
Ralph Köhnen
is Professor of German Literature and Didactics of Literature and Media at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. He specializes in modern German literature as well as literature and media didactics. His publications include Einführung in die Neuere deutsche Literaturwissenschaft (with Benedikt Jeßing; 4th edition, Metzler, 2017), Selbstoptimierung. Eine kritische Diskursgeschichte des Tagebuchs (Peter Lang, 2018), and Selbst-Berechnungen. Optimierungen des Menschen in Romanen um 1930 (Peter Lang, 2025).
Peter Liebregts
is Full Professor of Modern Literatures in English at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone literature as well as Classical Reception Studies. He is the author of Centaurs in the Twilight: w.b. Yeats’s Use of the Classical Tradition (Amsterdam, 1993), Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison/London, 2004), and Translations of Greek Tragedy in the Work of Ezra Pound (London/New York, 2019). He has recently co-edited The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, 3 vols (Oxford, 2013). He has also written on T.S. Eliot, Jhumpa Lahiri, Derek Walcott, and on Modernist authors and on classical reception.
is Professor of Literature at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden. Her research interests include Northern European literature after 1880, animal studies, interdisciplinarity, queer theory, transgender studies, education and intersectionality. She has written on authors such as Karen Blixen, Charlotte Weitze, Aino Kallas, Monica Fagerholm, P.O. Enqvist, Selma Lagerlöf, August Strindberg and Birgitta Trotzig. Her most recent book is Following the Animal. Power, Agency, and Human-Animal Transformations in Modern, Northern-European Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). She is affiliated with the transdisciplinary “Humanimal research group” at the Center for Gender Research at Uppsala University and the “New Zealand Center for Human-Animal Studies” at Canterbury University in Christchurch.
Gunther Martens
is Professor of German Literature at Ghent University in Belgium, specializing in narratology, rhetoric, and the cultural history of the encyclopedia. His research interests also extend to the documentary aspects of literature, digital humanities, and the relationship between literature and the brain. He currently supervises PhD projects on literary criticism on social media and on literary disability studies. His most recent publications include chapters on Hermann Broch, Alexander Kluge, David Foster Wallace, and Robert Musil, as well as: “Der Affe auf der Bühne, die Gesellschaft im Keller: Rhetorik, Pädagogik und Behinderung bei E.T.A. Hoffmann und Adalbert Stifter.” In: Rhetorik und Interdiskursanalyse: Theoretische und praktische Zugriffe auf ein wenig beachtetes Verhältnis, eds. Cyril de Beun et al. (Wehrhahn, 2023, 105–27).
Nicole Perry
is Senior Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature at the University of Auckland | Waipapa Taumata Rau, New Zealand. Her research interests include Indigenous artistic interventions in German/European culture, German colonialism in the South Pacific, travel writing and visual culture. She has edited volumes on the head in culture and literature and Austrian-Canadian relations. Currently, she is working on a monograph on Germanic conceptions of North American Indigeneity and Indigenous artistic remasterings in a contemporary setting.
Mattias Pirholt
is Professor of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has been a visiting scholar at Freie Universität Berlin, Universität Tübingen, Columbia University, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a member of the scholarly board
Nicholas Saul
is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Durham, UK. He most recently served as Director, Arts & Humanties, at the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham and President of the Internationale Novalis-Gesellschaft. He has held Guest Professorships at Cologne and Vermont, Fellowships from the British and Irish Academies, the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham, the University of Cologne Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach. He researches on Romanticism, Realisms, Modernisms and literary Darwinisms. Recent books are Gypsies and Orientalism in German Literature and Anthropology of the Long Nineteenth Century (Legenda, 2007), The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism (ed.; Cambridge University Press, 2009), The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures (co-edited with with Simon J. James; Rodopi, 2011), Realism and Romanticism in German Literature (co-edited with Dirk Göttsche; Aisthesis, 2013,) and The Early History of Embodied Cognition 1740–1920 (co-edited with John McCarthy et al.; Brill | Rodopi, 2016). His most recent publication is the monograph Interrogations of Evolutionism in German Literature 1859–2011 (Brill, 2021).
Brangwen Stone
teaches and researches in Germanic Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures at The University of Sydney, Australia, focusing on modern and contemporary Austrian, German and Swiss literature, film, and theatre. She is the author of Heimkehr? Narratives of Return to Germany’s Former Eastern Territories 1965–2001 (Wehrhahn, 2016), and recently co-edited Geheimnisse/Secrets (Nomos, 2022), and a special issue of Colloquia Germanica on “Imaginaries of Eastern Europe” (2020). Stone has particular interests in transnational literature and theatre; translation; gdr literature; food in literature;
Thomas Sutherland
is Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Southampton, UK. His research sits somewhere roughly between media studies, communication studies, intellectual history, and continental philosophy, with a particular interest in the historical and material conditions under which various forms of knowledge are produced and disseminated and the modes of comportment and self-cultivation enjoined by intellectual discourses. He is the author of Speaking Philosophically: Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Eirik Vassenden
is Professor of Scandinavian Literature at the Department of Literary, Linguistic and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. His fields of interest include literary criticism, book reviewing and theory of the public sphere as well as early 20th century literature. He is the author of The Ghost of the Critic. On the Art of Passing Aesthetic Judgment in the 21st Century (2023, in Norwegian), Norwegian Vitalism. Literature, Ideology and Lebensphilosophie 1890–1940 (2012, in Norwegian). He has also published on contemporary Scandinavian literature, on ecocritism and on nineteenth-century hero-worship in Bjørnson and Ibsen. He is currently working on a book project on the critique of civilization in Knut Hamsun’s later novels.
Simon Wendt
is Professor of American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. His research interests revolve around twentieth-century U.S. history, particularly African American history, gender history, racism, nationalism, memory, and heroism. He is the author of The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (University Press of Florida, 2007) and The Daughters of the American Revolution and Patriotic Memory in the Twentieth Century (University Press of Florida, 2020). In addition, he has edited or co-edited a number of books, including Warring over Valor: How Race and Gender Shaped American Military Heroism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Rutgers University Press, 2019) and Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World: Between Hegemony and Marginalization (with Pablo Dominguez Andersen; Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).