Heike Paul holds the chair of North American cultural and literary studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. She was a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin in the academic year 2003-2004 and just this year Harris Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College. She is co-organizer of the Bavarian America Academy’s Summer School for Transatlantic American Studies (since 2009) and chair of the DFG-funded doctoral program “Presence and Tacit Knowledge.” Her publications include a book on women's immigrant writing (Mapping Migration: Women's Writing and the American Immigrant Experience from the 1950s to the 1990s, [1999]), a monograph on German perceptions of African Americans (Kulturkontakt und Racial Presences: Afroamerikaner und die deutsche Amerika-Literatur, 1815-1914, [2005]), and a study of American mythology (The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies [2014]); she co-edited Multilingualism, a special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies with Werner Sollors (2006) and collaborated with Stephen Greenblatt, Ines Zupanov, et al. on the book Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (2009). Recent essays have appeared in Abolitionist Places (ed. by Martha Schoolman and Jared Hickman, 2013) and in American Studies Today (ed. by Winfried Fluck, Erik Redling, Sabine Sielke, and Hubert Zapf, 2014). Her current research interests are transnational American studies, critical regionalism as well as theories and phenomena of tacit knowledge.