Barbara Buchenau is Chair of North American Cultural Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She received her PhD in American Literature and the postdoctoral degree (Habilitation) in American Studies from Georg-August-University Göttingen, was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and taught Postcolonial Studies at the University of Bern. She is the author of Der frühe amerikanische historische Roman im transatlantischen Vergleich (2002) and the co-editor, among others, of Do the Americas have a Common Literary History? (2002) and Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires (2015). Her publications include essays on US American settler fiction, literary nationalism, francophone and anglophone colonial literature, as well as religious hermeneutics. Apart from serving as the designated speaker of the Research Training Group application she is currently preparing the book manuscript Typecasting in Colonial North America for publication.