Günter Leypoldt is a Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, the author of Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective (2009) and editor of American Cultural Icons: The Production of Representative Lives (2010). His present research interests include transatlantic romanticism and modernism, American pragmatism, transculturality, the borders between aesthetic and religious experience, and the sociology of knowledge formation.