Laura Bieger (Ph.D) is Professor for American Literary and Cultural Studies at Albrecht-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. She held teaching and research positions at Freie Universität Berlin, UC Berkeley and Universität Wien. She is the author of Ästhetik der Immersion (transcript 2007), which looks at urban spaces that stage the perceptual conjunction of world and image with an interest in the epistemological function of aesthetic experience. Her current book No Place Like Home develops a narrative theory based on the human need to belong and applies it in exemplary readings of American novels from the late Eighteenth to the Twenty-first century. She is the co-editor of four volumes: a collection of essays by Winfried Fluck entitled Romance with America? (Winter 2009), Mode: Ein kulturwissenschaftlicher Grundriss (Fink 2012), Revisiting the Sixties (Campus 2013) and The Imaginary and its Worlds (University of New England Press 2013).