Contributors Emily Aline Anderson is a PhD candidate at Universität Konstanz and is currently working on her thesis “Old Magic, New Realities: New Perspectives on Contemporary Magical Realism”. Her fields of interest include contemporary anglophone and world literature, fantastic literature as well as queer and feminist theory. Jochen Achilles is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of Würzburg and Adjunct Professor at the University of Mainz. His authored book publications include studies on the development of Sean O'Casey's plays and on the interface between the gothic tradition and psychological fiction, focusing on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. He co-edited volumes on Irish drama, modern drama, representations of evil in fiction and film, and on liminality and the short story. His research interests and numerous articles focus on cultural identities, Irish and American (short) fiction and drama. He is a founding member of the European Network for Short Fiction Research (ENSFR) and member of the Society for the Study of the American Short Story (SSASS). Julia Boll is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Univer‐ sity of Salzburg. She is co-convener of the International Federation for Theatre Research's political performances working group and of the Scottish Literature and Culture Network. Her work is located in the area of ethics, politics, literature and theatre. Her monograph The New War Plays was published in 2013, and her second book, Scapegoats, Devils, Outlaws, Witches: Bare Life's Lives on the Medieval, Early Modern, and Contemporary Stage, is under review. Xaver Boxhammer is research assistant and PhD student at LMU Munich. His research focuses on remediation in contemporary digital games, with particular interest in the representation of remediated media artefacts in apocalyptic game worlds. James Dowthwaite is Junior Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. His books include Ezra Pound and 20th Century Theories of Language: Faith with the Word (Routledge, 2019) and Aesthetic Criticism: An Introduction (Routledge 2026). Forthcoming work includes a new edition of the two books of the Rhymers' Club for the MHRA DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0015 Press's Jewelled Tortoise imprint, and his own collection of poems, Babylonian Pieces: A Dream Vision (Artel, 2026). Paul Fagan is a research fellow at LMU Munich and a founding general editor of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies. He is the co-editor of Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (Bloomsbury, 2021), Finnegans Wake - Human and Nonhuman Histories (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), and five Flann O’Brien essay collections with Cork University Press, most recently Flann O'Brien and the Nonhuman: Environments, Animals, Machines (2024). He has also edited the special issues Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural circulation (Irish Studies in Europe, 2021) and-Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing-(Humanities, 2026). Wolfgang Funk is a researcher and lecturer in English Literature and Culture at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz with a focus on Victorian poetry, contemporary fiction and literary form. He is the author of The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium (2015) and an introduc‐ tion to Gender Studies (2024). He is the co-editor of The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real (2012) as well as special issues of EJES on Poetry, Science and Technology (2018) and JSBC on Victorian Reproductions (2025). Laura Handl is a research assistant and PhD candidate at the Dresden University of Technology in the field of American Studies. She holds a BA in media communication (2016) and an MA in literature and culture studies with a focus on English and American Studies (2022). While working on a dissertation on the politics of anger in contemporary queer/ feminist manifestos, her further research interests include queer/ feminist narratology, media studies and critique. Irmtraud Huber is Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory at Universität Konstanz. Her work focuses on Victorian poetry and contemporary fiction with a particular interest in literary form and aesthetics of time and she has published three monographs, Literature after Postmodernism (2014, Palgrave), Present-tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction (2016, Palgrave) and Time and Timelessness in Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). She is co-editor of a Handbook of Poetic Forms (de Gruyter, 2025). Alexander Scherr is a researcher in anglophone literatures and cultures who has taught at the Universities of Giessen, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Bonn. He recently completed the manuscript for a monograph on essayistic forms of life in the anglophone novel, which emerged from a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). His work on narrative theory, the anglophone novel and essay, literature and science, Romantic and Gothic literature, and the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0015 296 Contributors documentary film has appeared in several edited collections and peer-reviewed journals including Style, Anglia, Anglistik, Amerikastudien / American Studies, and On_Culture. His first monograph on Narrating Evolution was published with WVT in 2017. Sina Schuhmaier is an academic staff member at the University of Mannheim. She is currently working on a research project that investigates narratives of contagious disease in the context of the British empire, including literary and non-fictional depictions of the Middle Passage. Her research spans the medical humanities, material ecocriticism, and postcolonial studies. Her first monograph Changing the Record: Englishness, Popular Music, and the Song Lyric in the 21st Century is forthcoming with Routledge. Sarah Wegener teaches English literature and culture at the Johannes Gu‐ tenberg-Universität Mainz. Her doctoral research focused on motherhood in Victorian science and poetry, and her recent publications include a co-edited special issue of the Journal for the Study of British Cultures on the topic of “Vic‐ torian Reproductions” (2024), and an article on “The Closed Buds of Decadence: Reproductive Idleness in the Poetry of Alice Meynell and Rosamund Marriott Watson” in Anglia (2025). Her present research specialises in contemporary eco-fiction. Raphael Zähringer (University of Tübingen) is a postdoc in English Literatures and Cultures with a focus on Irish Studies, crisis narratives, science fiction, and media epistemology. His first monograph explored urban dystopias (Hidden Topographies: Traces of Reality in Dystopian Fiction; De Gruyter, 2017); the second one is called Writing Crisis: Ireland, 1596-2018 (forthcoming). His most recent research project is the Tübingen Database of Irish Science Fiction (TDISF). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0015 Contributors 297