Notes on Contributors
Seán Allan
is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews and Joint Research Professor for Neuere Deutsche Literatur at the University of Bonn. His main research areas address the European Enlightenment and interdisciplinary approaches to music, film and the visual arts. He is the author of The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist. Ideals and Illusions (1996), The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist. Fictions of Security (2001), and co-author (with Ricarda Schmidt and Steven Howe) of Unverhoffte Wirkungen. Erziehung und Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (2014). He is co-editor (with Ricarda Schmidt and Steven Howe) of Konstruktive und destruktive Funktionen von Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists, and co-editor (with Elystan Griffiths) of a special number of German Life and Letters entitled Performance and Performativity in the Works of Heinrich von Kleist (2011). His most recent monograph Screening Art. Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema (2019) includes a detailed study of the reception of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and literature in post-war cinema. His most recent co-edited collection (with Jeffrey L. High) is entitled Inspiration Bonaparte? German Culture under Napoleonic Occupation (2021).
Susan C. Anderson
is Professor of German at the University of Oregon in Eugene. She works on German and Austrian literature and culture from the late 19th century to the present. Her publications focus on representations of difference, gender, and the foreign in literature and film; translation studies; narration; travel and tourism; concepts of disease and embodiment; and transnational approaches to literary studies in texts by Yoko Tawada, Christoph Ransmayr, Arthur Schnitzler, Günter Grass, Ricarda Huch, Irene Dische, Otto Weininger; and in films by Fatih Akin, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Doris Dörrie, and Wolfgang Becker, among others.
Elaine Chen
is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. They were awarded a Fulbright Combined Research and Teaching Award to Austria (2018–2019), as well as the Graduate Dean’s List Award and an M.A. at California State University, Long Beach in 2020 with a thesis on Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig’s reception of Kleist. They received the 2021 Kleist-Gesellschaft Award for Best Student Essay, and, together with Jeffrey L. High, co-authored “Receptions, Homages, and Anti-Occupational Allegories of Autonomy: The Case of Schiller’s Bohemian Cup and Kleist’s Broken Jug” in Heinrich von Kleist: Literary and Philosophical Paradigms (2022), which they co-edited with Jeffrey L. High and Rebecca Stewart-Gray.
Sophia Y. Clark
is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Central Oklahoma. After receiving her MA in German Studies from California State University, Long Beach, she received her Ph.D. in German Studies at Vanderbilt University in 2020. Her dissertation, titled “Staging Justice: Negotiating Legal Reform in German Literature and Theater of the Late 18th Century,” argues that German authors actively participated in the debates on legal reform in the late eighteenth century by modeling practical and theoretical changes on stage and in print. She is the co-editor with Jeffrey L. High of Heinrich von Kleist: Artistic and Political Legacies (2013) and author of “‘Inhuman!’ Transgressions: A Picture of Torture in Iffland’s The Foresters” (2021) on the reform of interrogational torture in the works of August Wilhelm Iffland in Law and Literature.
Carrie Collenberg-González
is Associate Professor, Section Head of German, and Director of the Deutsche Sommerschule am Pazifik at Portland State University. She has published articles on Heinrich von Kleist, German cinema, Goethe’s Faust, the aesthetics of terrorism, and the Red Army Faction, including articles in Feminist German Studies and the GoetheYearbook. She is co-author of Cineplex: German Language and Culture Through Film (2014) and the co-editor of Moving Frames: Photographs in German Film (2022). She is actively involved in the American and Oregon Association of Teachers of German and in the Coalition of Women in German.
Craig Epplin
is Associate Professor of Spanish at Portland State University, where his research and teaching focuses on modern and contemporary Latin American literature. He is the author of Late Book Culture in Argentina (2014), a study of recent Argentine literature in dialogue with the material conditions of book publishing, and is currently writing about the representation of underground spaces in contemporary Mexican literature.
Bernd Fischer
is Professor Emeritus of German at The Ohio State University. His publications include: Transcultural German Studies: History, Theory, Analysis (2017); Ein anderer Blick—Saul Aschers politische Schriften (2016); Cultural Transformations of the Public Sphere (2014); Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity (2011); A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist (2010/2003); Kulturpolitik und Politik der Kultur/Cultural Politics and the Politics of Culture (2007); Das Eigene und das Eigentliche: Klopstock, Herder, Fichte, Kleist. Episoden aus der Konstruktionsgeschichte nationaler Intentionalitäten (1996); Christoph Hein: Drama und Prosa im letzten Jahrzehnt der DDR (1990); Neue Tendenzen der Arnimforschung: Interpretation, Biographie, Edition (mit neuen Dokumenten) (1990); Ironische Metaphysik: Die Erzählungen Heinrich von Kleists (1988); Kabale und Liebe: Skepsis und Melodrama in Schillers bürgerlichem Trauerspiel (1987); Literatur und Politik: Die Novellensammlung von 1812 und das ‘Landhausleben’ von Achim von Arnim (1983).
Glen Gray
is a Ph.D. candidate in German at Johns Hopkins University and received his M.A. in German Studies from California State University, Long Beach in 2020. He received a Fulbright Teaching Award to Austria (2017–2018) and a DAAD grant to perform research at the Universität Bonn (2019), where he researched his M.A. thesis entitled “Kleist’s Self-Deconstructing Irony and Romantic Operatic Imagination in the Case of Das Käthchen von Heilbronn.” He has most recently conducted research on the transmission of representations of monarchical power from Metastasio’s operaseria to the German spoken theater in the eighteenth century at the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia in 2022. He is also co-founder of the Los Angeles Electroacoustic Ensemble, and has premiered compositions at LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York (2019) and at the 2022 Sound Pedro Music Festival.
Jeffrey L. High
is Professor of German Studies at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) and Guest Professor at Portland State University’s Deutsche Sommerschule am Pazifik. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of books on Schiller, Kleist, and the Late Enlightenment including: Schiller’s Literary Prose Works (2008), Who is this SchillerNow? with Nicholas Martin and Norbert Oellers (2011), Heinrich von Kleist: Artistic and Political Legacies with Sophia Clark (2013), Napoleonic Occupation and German Culture: Inspiration Bonaparte? with Seán Allan (2021), and Heinrich von Kleist: Artistic and Philosophical Paradigms with Rebecca Stewart-Gray and Elaine Chen (2022). He is a 2018 recipient of the CSULB “President’s Award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement in Scholarship and Mentoring,” the 2019 CSULB Honors Program’s “Most Valuable Professor,” and the 2020 CSULB Faculty Senate’s awards for both Scholarly Mentoring and Advising.
Wolf Kittler
is Professor for German and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published books and essays on literature, art, philosophy, the history of science, the history of warfare, and media theory including Der Turmbau zu Babel und das Schweigen der Sirenen. Über Das Reden, Das Schweigen, die Stimme und die Schrift in vier Texten von Franz Kafka (1985); Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie. Heinrich von Kleist und die Strategie der Befreiungskriege (1987); Franz Kafka. Schriftverkehr (1990); and Franz Kafka. Drucke zu Lebzeiten. Kritische Kafka-Ausgabe, two volumes (1996). His recent publications include articles on Impressionism as an effect of the chemical dye industry, on the history of the Greek alphabet from Euripides to Plato, on early wireless technology, on music in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s work, and on the early history of the term risk. His works in progress include On Wings of Light: A Cultural History of Telecommunication, and Echo’s Echoes: From Freudto Lacan.
Tim Mehigan
is Professor of German at the University of Queensland (Australia), with wide-ranging research expertise in German and European literature and thought, history of ideas, hermeneutics and special expertise on particular authors, works, genres and periods. He is the author of numerous articles and monographs including: Robert Musil and the Question of Science: Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Problem of the Two Cultures (2020); Heinrich von Kleist: Writing After Kant (2011); and The Critical Response to Musil’s “Man Without Qualities” (2003). His edited collections include: The Intellectual Landscape in the Works of J.M. Coetzee(2018); The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Friedrich Schiller (2023); and Immanent Hermeneutics: The Search for Ethics (forthcoming).
Cassio de Oliveira
is Associate Professor of Russian at Portland State University. He is the author of Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921–1938 (2023). His articles and reviews have appeared in RussianLiterature, the Slavic and East EuropeanJournal, Tolstoy Studies Journal, and other journals. His current research focuses on the reception and film adaptations of Mark Twain’s works in the Soviet Union.
Valerio Rocco Lozano
is Associate Professor of History of Modern Philosophy at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he has served as Vice-Dean for Research and Director of the MA in “Philosophy of History.” Since 2019 he is Director of the Spanish cultural institution “Círculo de Bellas Artes.” He is currently Tasks Leader of the European Research Project “REVFAIL” on the notion of Failure and its reversibility. He has published the book La vieja Roma en el joven Hegel (2011) and edited eleven collective volumes on German Idealism and Political Philosophy, including Hegely Hölderlin. Una amistad estelar (2021); Glosario del fracaso (2020); Éxodos y geopolíticas (2019); Estética del disenso. Políticas del arte en Jacques Ranncière (2018); La herida del concepto (2016); Europa: tradición o proyecto (2013); Teología y teonomía de la política (2013) and Filosofía del Imperio (2010). He has also co-edited the special issues of the journals Philosophical Readings (on Schiller and Revolution), Bajo Palabra (on Philosophy of Religion in contemporary Europe) and Revista de Occidente (on the concept of Failure).
Markus Wessendorf
is Professor of Theatre in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His areas of specialization are in performance studies and theater theory, postcolonial and intercultural performance, postdramatic and devised theater, directing and dramaturgy. His translation of Brecht’s The Judith of Shimoda was first staged at Honolulu’s Kennedy Theatre in April 2010, and then again at New York’s LaMaMa Experimental Theatre in May 2012. In his writings, he has linked theater and performance to a wide range of topics, including ethics, masochism, Mohism, terrorism, tourism, surveillance, and zombies. He has published a monograph on Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre (1998) and essays on other postmodern theater artists and dramatists including Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Richard Maxwell, Mark Ravenhill, and The Wooster Group. He has been the editor of the BrechtYearbook since 2018.