Winfried Fluck is Professor em. of American Culture at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of Freie Universität Berlin. He studied at Freie Universität Berlin, Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, taught at the Universität Konstanz, Universidad Autonoma Barcelona, Princeton University, UC Irvine, the University of Richmond and Dartmouth College, and was a research fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, the Advanced Studies Center of the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, and the Internationales Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum in Vienna. His books include Ästhetische Theorie und literaturwissenschaftliche Methode; Populäre Kultur; Theorien amerikanischer Literatur; Inszenierte Wirklichkeit. Der amerikanische Realismus 1865-1900; Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans; and German? American? Literature? New Directions in German-American Studies, edited with Werner Sollors. He is a founding member and director of the Graduate School for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Co-Director of the “Futures of American Studies”-Institute at Dartmouth College. His most recent book publications are Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies (2009), Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, edited with Donald Pease and John Carlos Rowe (2011), and American Studies Today. New Research Agendas, ed. with E. Redling, S. Sielke and H.Zapf (2014).