Jan Stievermann is Professor of the History of Christianity in the US at the University of Heidelberg. He has written on a broad range of topics in the fields of American religious history and American literature, including articles for Early American Literature and William and Mary Quarterly. His book Der Sündenfall der Nachahmung: Zum Problem der Mittelbarkeit im Werk Ralph Waldo Emersons (Schöningh, 2007; The Original Fall of Imitation: The Problem of Mediacy in the Works of R.W.E.) is a comprehensive study of the co-evolution of Emerson’s religious and aesthetic thought. Together with Reiner Smolinski, he edited Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana–America’s First Bible Commentary (Mohr Siebeck & Baker Academic, 2010). Most recently, he published with Oliver Scheiding A Peculiar Mixture: German-Language Cultures and Identities in Eighteenth-Century North America (Pennsylvania State UP, 2013). Currently, he leads a DFG-funded team transcribing and editing vol. 5 of Cotton Mather’s hitherto unpublished Biblia Americana, the first comprehensive Bible commentary produced in British North America. For the Biblia-project as a whole (10 vols.) he also serves as the executive editor.