Daniela Agostinho is a PhD candidate in Culture Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal within the Lisbon Consortium pro- gramme. She holds a BA in Communication Studies from the New University of Lisbon (2007) and also studied at the Free University of Berlin. Her doctoral thesis examines the photographic representation of women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück. She is founding editor of Diffractions—Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture and recently co-edited Panic and Mourning. The Cultural Life of Trauma (Walter de Gruyter, 2012). Her main areas of interest are Cultural Theory, Visual Culture, Film and Gender Studies.

Sarah Archino serves as the Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in American Art in Paris and as a research fellow with the Duchamp Research Center in Schwerin, Germany. She received her PhD from the Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2012. Her dissertation, Reframing the Narrative of Dada in New York, 1910-1926 examined the development of an American Dada aesthetic based on anarcho-individualism and the vernacular, proposing an iteration of Dada as a native, anti-institutional spirit. Her next project will expand on these themes of anarchy and the vernacular in a broader examination of early-twentieth-century American modernism.

Ina Batzke is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School Practices of Literature at Westfälische Wilhelms Universität Münster. Her disser- tation project is entitled Of Aliens and DREAMers: Contemporary Rhetorical Conceptions of Undocumented Immigrants in the Contro- versy Surrounding the US DREAM Act.

Ilka Brasch is a PhD candidate and lecturer in American Studies at Leibniz University of Hannover. She is also a member of the research unit Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice. Her thesis focuses on crime plots and the use of technologies in silent and sound seri- als in American cinema between 1910 and 1940. She has researched film serials in archives in Los Angeles and in Rochester, NY.

Emanuela Burini is a foreign language and support teacher at the Human Science college Lorenzo Federici, Bergamo (Italy) and has had teaching experience in other High Schools (Fine Arts Andrea Fantoni and Human Science college Paolina Secco Suardo) in her city. She specialised in teaching students with special educational needs in 2003, obtained the Bachelor of Arts degree in 2007 and she is currently studying a PhD in Euro-American Literature at the University of Bergamo (Italy). She published a poetry book in 2012 and a monograph on the Renaissance manuscript The Bible of Borso d’Este in 2013.

Sarah Earnshaw holds a Masters degree in War Studies as well as undergraduate degrees in History and English Literature from the University of Glasgow. Currently, she is planning to broaden her research on increased intervention in post-Cold War world and relat- ed fields by pursing doctoral level work.

Florian Groß is a research assistant and lecturer in American Studies at Leibniz Universität Hannover. He has published articles on Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and the television series Ally McBeal and 30-Rock and co-edited The Aesthetics of Authenticity (2012). His main research interests include postmodern literature and culture, US popular culture (especially television series and comics/graphic novels), and the most recent developments in US fiction. He is currently working on his PhD thesis with the working title Technology. Economy. Creativity. Post-Network Television Series.

Julian Henneberg is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School of North American Studies, where he is preparing a dissertation about the surge of ‘neo-naturalist’ tropes and medical-materialist models of mind in recent US literature. Trained in comparative literature and cultural studies, his main research interests are twentieth-century literature, cultural theory, and intellectual history. Aside from his doctoral research, Julian also works as a translator: with an American colleague, he is working on the first English trans- lation of Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. II.

Aleksandra Holubowicz is a PhD student in Literary Studies at the University of Gdansk, Poland. Her dissertation project is entitled Borderlands. A Comparative Study of Chicana and Polish Contemporary Texts.

Jasmin Humburg studied American Studies, Media Studies and Communication Studies at Universität Hamburg and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a doctoral candidate in the early preparatory stages of dissertation project (on televisual representations and aesthetics of poor white America) and currently employed as a research and teaching assistant (WiMi) at the Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik, Universität Hamburg.

Eva Jobs is a doctoral candidate at the University of Marburg. Her PhD project Secrecy, Trust, Betrayal: Cooperation among Intelli- gence Agencies and the Impact on German-American Security Relations, 1947-1965 engages with the role personal and individual relationships like friendship, patronage, or antipathy played for establishing an institutional liaison. Her research interests include intelligence and military history, myth theories, gender studies, and history of emotions.

Wiebke Kartheus holds an MA in American studies at Leipzig University. Together with her cohort she edited the 6th issue of the MA peer-reviewed journal entitled American Memories. Having earned her Bachelor’s degree in World English studies and art history, Wiebke’s research interests lie at the intersection of Cultural studies and art history with special regard to aesthetic response and the politics of art criticism in relation to race, ethnicity, and gender. For the moment her analyses are overall informed by theories of race and the body as well as queer theory and post-structuralism. Her fascination with multidimensional texts caused Wiebke to engage in mediums that combine different textual and semiotic qualities, such as graphic novels or music videos.

Curd Knüpfer is a third-year PhD student at the Graduate School of North American Studies and the John F. Kennedy Institute’s De- partment of Politics. He is currently working on a study of right-wing media’s possible impact on the discourse and perception of American foreign policy. Before moving to Berlin, he studied at the University of Bonn and wrote his MA thesis on the rise of neocon- servative ideology in the US During the Fall-semester of 2013, he was a visiting scholar at the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs in Washington D.C.

Dennis Mischke is wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the chair of American Studies, University of Stuttgart and a doctoral candidate at the Ruhr University Research School in Bochum. He is currently finishing a PhD thesis on Confidence and Imperial Cosmopolitanism in the work of Herman Melville.

Auréliane Narvaez holds an agrégation in English, a master’s degree in English and American studies and graduated in Law from Sci- ences-Po Paris. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of American studies at Paris IV-Sorbonne Université, where she is completing a PhD in late eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century American history with a particular emphasis on the dynamics of secularization, religious scepticism and spiritual pluralism in the context of the Second Great Awakening period in antebellum America (1790-1865). Her dissertation, entitled In the shadow of the Enlightenment: the antebellum spiritual hothouse: Religious Syncretism, Scepticism and Dynamics of Secularism in American Society and American Letters investigates the interplay of religious, skeptical, spiritual and pseudo-scientific discourses in antebellum America, and their dynamic contribution to the forging of a singular American understanding of secularism. Auréliane Narvaez was a lecturer in French at Duke University (2008-2009) and Oxford University (Christ Church, Brasenose, Lincoln College, 2010-2011). Besides her research she teaches courses on American history and English phonetics at Paris-Sorbonne Université. She has been awarded a dual-scholarship by Columbia University (NY) and Paris-Sorbonne to spend one semester at Columbia as visiting researcher in 2015.

Mark Neufeld is an Associate Professor and Head of the Global Politics Section, Department of Politics, at Trent University. His re- search interests include International Relations, Political Economy, and Critical Theory.

Sonja Schillings is a research assistant affiliated with the John F. Kennedy Institute of North American Studies’ Department of Litera- ture. She has recently completed her dissertation on piracy and the narrative construction of legitimate violence; her current project deals with the formal construction of dignity in American literature of the 1950s.

Simon Schleusener is a postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He has published essays and reviews on American literature, cultural theory, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. As a Research Associate at the Berlin-based John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, he has taught numerous courses on American culture and literature. In 2012, he completed his dissertation on the topic Kulturelle Komplexität: Gilles Deleuze und die Kulturtheorie der American Studies. His current research interests include affect theory, media studies, new materialist philosophies, and the relationship between culture and capitalism.

Wieland Schwanebeck is currently employed as a research assistant at Dresden University of Technology. His fields of interest include impostor characters, Gender and Masculinity Studies, British film history, and Alfred Hitchcock (a conference on whom he will be hosting in Dresden in June). He completed his PhD project on the adaptable masculinities of Patricia Highsmith’s Talented Mr. Ripley in 2013. His publications include a study of the German Campus Novel (Annäherungsversuche, 2012), the forthcoming Metzler Handbook of Masculinities Studies (co-edited with Stefan Horlacher and Bettina Schötz), and numerous articles on topics such as film, narratolo- gy, gender studies and adaptation studies, which have appeared in journals such as Literature/Film Quarterly, Adaptation, Men and Masculinities, and Culture, Society & Masculinities.

Sara Swerdlyk is a recent graduate of the double-degree Masters programme in Economy, State, and Society offered through the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at University College London (UCL). Her Masters dissertation was a case study of the state security response to Hungarian Roma seeking asylum in Canada between 2008 and 2011. Part of this initial research was presented at the ASN World Convention at Columbia University in 2013. In the summer of 2012, Sara conducted a research residency at the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno. In 2011/2012, she acted as Executive Editor of Slovo: Journal of Central and East European Affairs. Most recently, she presented research on the Czech Roma Holocaust at the Institute for Diasporic and Genocide Studies at Bochum University. Sara is currently residing in Budapest while studying the Hungarian language and providing online teaching sup- port for Global Politics undergraduate courses offered through Trent University, Canada.

Katharina Thalmann is currently in her second year as a PhD student at the University of Freiburg. Her dissertation project deals with the status change of conspiracy theory from legitimate to illegitimate knowledge between the 1950s and 1980s. She also serves as a research assistant at the University of Freiburg where she works on the heroization of American presidents as part of the collaborative research centre Heroes—Heroisations—Heroisms. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Language, Culture and Translation at the Uni- versity of Mainz, where she majored in English and Spanish. She holds a MA degree in British and North American Cultural Studies from the University of Freiburg.

Nathan Vanderpool is a doctoral candidate in sociology with a specialization in modern religion at the John F. Kennedy Institute at Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests include the ways in which lived religion is changing in a context of globalized immigrati- on and digital communication. His current work examines the affordances of religious pluralism(s) as manifested in interfaith organiza- tions in the United States.

Birte Wege is a third-year PhD Candidate at the Graduate School of North American Studies. She completed her undergraduate work in English Literature, Islamic Studies and Political Science at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg and received her MA in English Literature from the University of Alberta, Canada. Her current research focuses on war-themed non-fiction graphic narratives by such artists as Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, and Emmanuel Guibert.

Branko Woischwill studied communication science and works as a researcher in sociology at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Depart- ment of Sociology, Freie Universität Berlin. He is an experienced communications specialist and has shared his expertise with several major companies in the course of his career. He has also published a number of articles and presented a series of lectures on success- ful communication. His particular area of expertise is the communication of trust.