Peter Schneck is dean of the faculty of languages and literatures and professor and chair of American Literature and Culture at Osnabrück University, Germany. He is also the co-founder and -director of the research cluster "Cognition and Poetics", and director of the Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law (OSI). After studying American Studies, Media and Communication Studies at the Free University Berlin and Yale University, he received his Ph.D. at the FU Berlin in 1996. Between 1997 and 2006 he taught at the Amerika-Institut / LMU Munich. He has been a fellow at the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and a visiting scholar at the University of California at Irvine, Nottingham University and the University of Torino, Italy. Most recent publications include “Cognitive Style and Perceptual Skill in the Realism of Thomas Eakins: Pragmatism, Cognitive Science and Art” (Amerikastudien/American Studies 58:2 (2013): 213-34) and “Finding Words for (not) Losing one’s Mind: Sense of Self in Narratives of Mental Illness” (C. Birkle, J. Heil. Ed. Cultural Representations of American Medicine. Heidelberg, 2013); Rhetoric and Evidence: Legal Conflict and Literary Representation in American Culture (Berlin: DeGruyter 2011); Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo (New York: Continuum, 2010; co-ed) as well as articles on cognitive poetics, literature and visual art, media history, cultural studies, and law and literature. Since 2006 he has been a member of the board of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), and he served as the association's president from 2008-2011.