List of Contributors Liza B. Bauer is the scientific manager of the Panel on Planetary Thinking at Justus Liebig University Giessen and coordinates the university’s interdisci‐ plinary research section “Human-Animal Studies”. Her work combines critical and literary animal studies with interdisciplinary research on human-planet relationships. Her doctoral thesis engages with the potential of speculative narratives to foster cultural imaginaries on living well with so-called live‐ stock animals and was awarded with the “Research Award for Sustainable Development” by the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND) and the “Dr.-Herbert-Stolzenberg-Award for Excellent Dissertations in Cultural Studies”. A revised version was published in 2024 under the title Livestock and Literature: Reimagining Postanimal Companion Species (Palgrave Macmillan); other relevant works include a co-edited special issue on Ecocriticism and Narrative Form (SubStance, 2021), a co-authored chapter in Animals and Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), and a collaborative, German-language article on planetary forest politics (PVS, 2022). Natalya Bekhta is Academy Research Fellow at Tampere University (Finland), where she directs a research project on “Utopia and Eastern European Literature after 1989”. Her recent work focuses on contemporary Ukrainian fiction and develops a world-literary theory of the “second-world” literary region. She is the author of We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction (2020). Stella Butter is Professor of English Literary Studies at the University of Kai‐ serslautern-Landau (RPTU). In her research, she is interested in how literature engages with processes of modernisation. She has published on representations of home in contemporary literature, literary reflections on reason and rational‐ ity, and contingency and literature. Among her publications are the co-edited special issues on “Imaginative Geographies of Home: Ambivalent Mobility in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture” (Literary Geographies, 2019) and “Abstract Reflection in Contemporary Fiction” (Anglia, 2023). She is a founding member of the interdisciplinary research network “Scales of Home in Contemporary Europe” as well as of the research network “Diversity & Transformation: Heterogeneous Societies as a Challenge for Interdisciplinary Research”, in whose context she explores depictions of luxury in twenty-first century literature. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0019 List of Contributors 425 Deborah de Muijnck is a postdoctoral researcher at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus Liebig University Giessen. For‐ merly a researcher at RWTH Aachen University (2019-2023), an institutional affiliate at Harvard University (2023), and a research fellow at the University of Graz (2024), she holds a PhD in English Literature. Her first monograph explores how British military personnel reconstruct their identities after war experience through autobiographical writing (2022). Other publications such as Pandemic Storytelling (2025, Brill) address the reciprocal impact of pandemics and narrativity, the influence of non-normative life experiences on narration (Poetics of Disturbances, Brill, 2024), and the relationship between narrative, culture, and identity (Routledge Companion, 2025). As a NEST research network investigator, her work in empirical ecocriticism explores narratives that raise awareness, address ethical issues, and propose solutions to climate change in European local communities. Her second monograph discusses literary scandals as forms of cultural transgression in-Britain-from the 18th-21st century.- Alexandra Effe is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions (LCE) at the University of Oslo and teaches anglophone and comparative literature at the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages. She is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression (Palgrave, 2017) and of A History of Autofiction (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), and co-editor of The Autofictional (Palgrave, 2022) and of Autofiction, Emotions, and Humour (Routledge, 2023). She has published on narrative and cognitive theory, twenty-first-century literature and culture, postcolonial literature, testimonial writing, and manuscript studies. As visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she co-convened the project “Autofiction in Global Perspective.” Anna-Lena Eick is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of General and Comparative Literature at Gutenberg Institute for World Literature and Written Media at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies from Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. Her doctoral thesis engages with the co-evolution of visual media (such as photography and early film) and the critical re-orientation of postmodern historical novels from the 1960s onwards. A revised version, ‚Geschichte zerfällt in Bilder, nicht in Geschichten‘ - Visualität in der literarischen Geschichtsdarstellung, was published in 2024 with Brill in the series Inter/ Media. Her current project examines the intersections of a postdigital mediascape and transnational issues of cultural belonging and identity. Further research inter‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0019 426 List of Contributors ests include classical and post-classical narratology, interand transmediality studies, as well as ancient mythology. Carolin Gebauer is Lecturer in British Literature and Culture at the University of Wuppertal and a postdoctoral researcher at Wuppertal’s Center for Narrative Research. She was part of the Horizon 2020 project “Crises as OPPORTUNI‐ TIES: Towards a Level Telling Field on Migration and a New Narrative of Successful Integration” (2021-2025), funded by the European Union, and she is currently serving as a member of the executive team of DIEGESIS, a bilingual interdisciplinary e-journal for narrative research. Carolin Gebauer is the author of the award-winning monograph Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel (De Gruyter, 2021). She has coedited special issues of DIEGESIS (“European Narratives on Migration: Concepts and Case Studies”, 2023) and Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies (“Nomadworld: Global Mobility and the New Anglophones”, 2024), as well as a collected volume entitled Mobility, Agency, Kinship: Representations of Migration Beyond Victimhood (Palgrave, 2024). Marion Gymnich is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Univer‐ sity of Bonn. Since 2019, she has been Principal Investigator and Vice-Speaker in the Cluster of Excellence “Beyond Slavery and Freedom: Asymmetric Depend‐ encies in Pre-Modern Societies” (EXC 2036) / the Bonn Center for Slavery and Dependency Studies. Her research interests include British literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, children’s literature, narrative theory, gender studies, genre theory and dependency studies. She has published six books and more than 100 articles in journals and edited volumes and has (co-)edited 20 books. Since 2023 she has been Dean of Studies of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Bonn. Hannah Klaubert is a postdoctoral researcher in the interdisciplinary “Nuclear Natures” project at TEMA, the Department for Thematic Studies, at Linköping University in Sweden. She holds a bi-national PhD in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies from Stockholm University, Sweden, and the GCSC at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. During her PhD, she was employed as a research assistant at the Chair of English and American Literature and Cultural Studies at JLU and served as the interim academic coordinator of the International PhD Program (IPP) “Literary and Cultural Studies” at the GCSC. Elizabeth Kovach is a Scholarship Officer at Goethe University Frankfurt. She obtained her PhD at the International PhD Programme “Literary and Cultural Studies” (IPP) and the International Graduate Centre for the Study 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0019 List of Contributors 427 of Culture (GCSC) at Justus Liebig University Giessen with a dissertation entitled Novel Ontologies After 9/ 11: The Politics of Being in Contemporary Theory and U.S.-American Narrative Fiction (2016). Her postdoctoral research project explores values and ethics surrounding work in U.S.-American literary history from industrialization to the present. Heidi Lucja Liedke is Professor of English Literature at Goethe-University Frankfurt/ Main. From 2018 to 2020, she was a Humboldt Foundation Postdoc‐ toral Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of three monographs (The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850-1901 [2018], Faultiere. Ein Portrait [with Tobias Keiling, 2021] and Livecasting in Twenty-First- Century British Theatre: NT Live and the Aesthetics of Spectacle, Materiality and Engagement [2023]) and numerous articles. Recent articles cover topics such as queer ethics, depictions of reading, and failed endings and are forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Literary Ethics, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerika‐ nistik and Performance Research. She is the co-editor of a special issue of Theatre Research International on “Presence and Precarity in (Post-)Pandemic Theatre and Performance” (2023). Ansgar Nünning is Professor of English and American Literature and Cultural Studies and founding director of the “International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture” (GCSC), funded by the Excellence Initiative and inaugurated in 2006, at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, as well as of the International PhD-Programme (IPP) and the European PhDnet Programme. His book publica‐ tions include Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives (ed. with Vera Nünning & Birgit Neumann, 2010), Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie: Ansätze - Personen - Grundbegriffe (ed., 5th ed. 2013), Emergent Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature: Conceptual Frameworks and Critical Analyses (ed. with Michael Basseler & Daniel Hartley, 2015), Methods of Textual Analysis in Literary Studies: Approaches, Basics, Model Interpretations (ed. with Vera Nün‐ ning, 2020), Krisennarrative und Krisenszenarien. GRM: Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 70.3-4 (ed. with Vera Nünning, 2020), The Value of Literature. REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 36 (ed. with Vera Nünning, 2021). In addition to narrative theory, English and American literature, cultures of memory, and literary and cultural theory, his recent research interests include crisis narratives, forms of life and notions of the good life, narratives of slow change (e.g. climate change, mind change, stories of health and illness), and the interfaces between literature and happiness/ wellbeing, and between narratives/ narrative studies and medicine/ salutogenesis. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0019 428 List of Contributors Vera Nünning is Professor of English Philology at Heidelberg University, where she also served as vice-rector for international affairs. She has published books on eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century British literature, and (co-)edited 28 volumes mainly on contemporary literature and narrative theory. Her articles deal with narrative theory, gender studies, cultural studies and British fiction from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Her book Reading Fictions, Changing Minds (2014) joins insights from psychology and neurosciences with those of narratology. She was a fellow in two Institutes of Advanced Studies as well as guest professor in several European universities, and is associate editor of three book series. She is currently co-editing The Palgrave Handbook of Feminist, Queer and Trans Narrative Studies (2025). Magdalena Pfalzgraf is Junior Professor of English Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Bonn. Publications include Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature in English: Crossing Borders, Transcending Boundaries (Routledge, 2021), The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature: Transcultural Engagements, Global Frictions (Bloomsbury 2024, edited with Silvia Anastasijevic and Hanna Teichler) and Moving Publicly, Writing Mobility: Public Transport in African Literatures. Special Issue of English Studies in Africa 67.2. (2024, edited mit Anna-Leena Toivanen). She is co-editor of Matatu: Journal for African Literary and Cultural Studies (Brill). Jan Rupp is currently coordinator of the Research Centre for the Study of Culture (RCSC), Giessen, having served as an interim professor at the universities of Frankfurt, Giessen, Heidelberg and Wuppertal. He is the author of Genre and Cultural Memory in Black British Literature (2010) and a second monograph on representations of ritual in modernist Pageant Fictions (2016). His research interests include the contemporary novel, cultural memory studies, narrative theory, intermediality, ritual in literature, and (neo-)Victorian studies. He has published widely on diasporic British as well as postcolonial Anglophone writing and theory, including on didactic perspectives of the literature class‐ room. Among his current work is a project on figurations of world writing and environmental memory in literatures of the Global South. Christine Schwanecke is Professor of English Literature and Culture as well as Head of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. She specialises in drama, early modern literature and culture, digital literature and culture, intermediality, and transgeneric and transmedial narratology. Her publications include A Narratology of Drama: Dramatic Storytelling in Theory, History, and Culture from the Renaissance to the Twenty-First Century (De Gruyter 2022), The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative: Promoting Positive 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0019 List of Contributors 429 Change (Narr 2023, with Corinna Assmann and Jan Rupp), as well as articles on (digital) drama and theatre, intermediality, and the intersection of literature and culture. Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis is a literary and cultural studies scholar and her work focuses on future(s) and postclassical narratology such as econarratology. Anna Tabouratzidis holds a bi-national PhD in English Literary and Cultural Studies ( Justus Liebig University Giessen), and in German Studies (University of Warwick). Her research engages with utopian and future studies, the politics and aesthetics of care, and alternative temporalities. She has co-edited a special issue on Ecocriticism and Narrative Form (SubStance, 2021) and published on queer temporalities (in Palgrave Handbook of Feminist, Queer, and Trans Narrative Studies 2025) and incommensurable time regimes (in Troubling Times, 2024). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0019 430 List of Contributors