Martina Allen
is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer for English Literatures and Cultures at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her dissertation thesis was published as GenReVisions: Genre Experimentation and World-Construction in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (Winter) in 2020. Her main research interests are genre studies, affect studies, Victorian studies, medical humanities, discourses of pathology, as well as narratives of intoxication and addiction. She is currently working on a monograph tracing the rise of the disease paradigm of drug use through depictions of opiate use in 19th-century British literature.
Paula Barros
is senior lecturer and a member of the Institut de recherche sur la Renaissance, l’âge Classique et les Lumières (IRCL – UMR 5186), Département d’études anglophones, Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry. Her research focuses on early modern English religious culture, with a special interest in issues of emotional distress, consolation and spiritual comfort. She has co-edited several collections of essays, including Circulation, Appropriation, Translation: George Herbert and John Bunyan (Bunyan Studies, 2018) and La guérison dans la Grande-Bretagne de la première modernité, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Études Épistémè, 2024).
Roman Bischof-Vegh
studied English and German Literature at the University of Konstanz, Biology at the ETH Zurich and English and History at the University of Basel. In 2016, he received his Master of Arts from the University of Basel with a thesis on embodied concepts of war and war experience in First World War poetry. In 2021, he completed his PhD at the University of Bern with a thesis on representations of mental illness in contemporary Anglo-American novels. Due to his biological studies, his research interests in literary studies often overlap with topics in natural sciences.
Joseph Crawford
is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of four books: Raising Milton’s Ghost (2011), Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (2013), The Twilight of the Gothic (2014), and Inspiration and Insanity in British Poetry, 1825–55 (2019). He has also published widely on the history of popular fiction, especially in the Gothic and romance genres, and on the medical humanities in the early nineteenth century.
is professor and chair of English literature at Lund University, Sweden. His research explores various aspects of the intellectual life and cultural history of Britain and Europe during the romantic period. Particular areas of interest have included the Shelley circle, the sublime, the relationship between science and literature, and Romanticism(s) in the Nordic countries. Recent publications include British Romanticism and Denmark (Edinburgh UP, 2022) and (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime (Cambridge UP, 2024).
Eveline Kilian
was Professor of English at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin from 2006 until her retirement in 2024. Her major research areas are modernism and interwar literature, metropolitan cultures, life writing, trans/gender and queer studies, and she has published widely in these fields. She is currently Senior Researcher at HU Berlin and the German PI of the binational research project Queer Theory in Transit: Reception, Translation, and Production of Queer Theory in Polish and German Contexts, which brings together scholars from the HU Berlin and the University of Warsaw (funded by DFG and NCN, 2023–2026).
Sandra Marzinkowski
holds a B.A. in English/American Studies and Romance Studies (French) and an M.A. in English and American Studies. Her research interests include Queer Studies, Embodied Narratology, and Critical Psychiatry. In her M.A. thesis she investigated fiction narrated from the perspective of pathologised individuals and explored what parameters guide readers’ empathy. In her PhD project, she examines the connection between hystericisation and sexual identity invalidation in sapphic neo-Victorian fiction, arguing that this fiction makes visible how female homoeroticism is incorporated into normative identity formation processes through the psychoanalytic heritage of sequentiality as well as affective and embodied reinterpretability.
Daniel McCann
completed his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D at Queen’s University Belfast. He was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Oxford University, and was the Simon and June Li Darby Fellow in Medieval English at Lincoln College, Oxford. He was then Vertretungsprofessor at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, followed by a stint as Vertretungsprofessor at Rostock Universität. He now is Senior Lecturer in English at Rostock Universität.
is an historian who teaches in the Critical Disability Studies Graduate Program, York University, Toronto, Canada. He has taught a university credit course on Mad People’s History since 2000 and has had research published on this topic since 1994.
Katrin Röder
is Professor of English Literature at TU of Dortmund University. Her research areas include early modern and 18th-century literature and culture, affect studies, gender studies, critical disability studies, ethical criticism and contemporary anglophone life storying. She has co-edited a themed issue on “Shame and Shamelessness in Anglophone Literature and Media” with the European Journal of English Studies (2019) and is currently preparing a monograph based on her DFG-funded research project on shame as a narrative affect in contemporary automedial art by female British and Indian authors with disabilities, chronic illness and mental distress.
Naomi Rokotnitz
is Director of The Israel and Ione Massada Fellowships Programme at Worcester College, and co-convener of the ‘Fiction and Other Minds’ strand of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Programme (OCCT), both at the University of Oxford. Author of Trusting Performance (Palgrave, 2011) and many articles, her research explores the intersections of literature, philosophy, and cognitive science, especially exploring matters of intersubjectivity, trust, agency, and authenticity.
Anne Rüggemeier
teaches English Literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She is the principal investigator of the DFG (German Research Council) funded project Poetics of Isolation in English Literature (17th to 21st century) and the author of two monographs: Die relationale Autobiographie (WVT 2014) and Literary Lists: A Short History of Form and Function (Palgrave Pivot 2023, with Eva von Contzen & Roman Barton). She co-edited the volume Forms of List-Making: Epistemic, Literary, and Visual Enumeration (Palgrave Macmillan 2022, open access). Further areas of academic interest include narrative studies, life writing, graphic narratives, feminist theory and the medical humanities. Her work has been published in Poetics Today, a/b Auto/Biography Studies, Journal of Comics and Graphic Novels and the European Journal for English Studies.
is a researcher and lecturer at the Department for Comparative Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. She is the author of Transferences: The Aesthetics and Poetics of the Therapeutic Relationship (2019) and co-editor of Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter: Psychoanalysis, Talking Therapies and Creative Practice (2020), Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of “Loss” (2021), and Entanglements: Envisioning World Literature from the Global South (2022). With Aimee Pozorski, she served as executive co-editor of Philip Roth Studies and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth (2024). She has published widely on psychoanalysis, literature, and other media as well as late-nineteenth-century transformations of realism.
Gerold Sedlmayr
is Professor of English Literature Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (since 2024). He read English and History at the University of Passau and studied abroad at Trinity College Dublin. Before he came to Erlangen-Nürnberg, he was Professor of English Literature and Culture at TU Dortmund University (2013–2024) and Professor of British Cultural Studies at the University of Würzburg (2011–2013). His main research areas are the literature and culture of the Romantic era; literary and cultural theory, including economic criticism; contemporary British and Irish literature and culture; fantasy literature; popular culture. He is the author of Brendan Kennelly’s Literary Works: The Developing Art of an Irish Writer, 1959–2000 (2005), The Discourse of Madness in Britain, 1790–1815: Medicine, Politics, Literature (2010) and co-author of The Orphan in Fiction and Comics since the 19th Century (2018). Since 2019, he is one of the general editors of the Journal for the Study of British Cultures (JSBC). He has edited and co-edited various collections of essays and journal issues, for instance Romantic Bodyscapes: Embodied Selves, Embodied Spaces and Legible Bodies in the Romantic Age (2015) and Romantic Interventions (2024; special issue of European Romantic Review; ed. with Marie Hologa and Sophia Lange). He is a member of the research network ‘Methodologies of Economic Criticism’ (www.economic-criticism.de).
Christina Slopek-Hauff
is currently completing her Ph.D. project at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, where she is also employed as lecturer and research assistant in the section of Anglophone Literatures / Literary Translation. With a keen interest in the medical humanities, she has been a visiting researcher at Universiteit van Amsterdam in 2024, where she received feedback on her dissertation about a plurality of psychologies in African and African-diasporic fiction. Passionate
Cornelia Wächter
is Professor of British Cultural Studies at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany. She is the author of Place-ing the Prison Officer: The ‘Warder’ in the British Literary and Cultural Imagination (2015) and co-editor of, for instance, Negotiating Institutional Heritage and Wellbeing (2022) and Narrating the Heritage of Psychiatry (forthcoming). She was the principal investigator and coordinator of the international, interdisciplinary network Complicity: Enfoldings and Unfoldings (2021–2024), funded by the German Research Foundation.