Contributors Jonathan Arac is Andrew Mellon Professor of English, Emeritus, at the Univer‐ sity of Pittsburgh, where he founded and directed the Humanities Center. Be‐ yond teaching and writing, collaborative-work has provided the great pleasure of his career, beginning in 1979, when he joined the masthead of boundary 2, where he remains on the Editorial Collective. Other long collaborations, now concluded, include the Successful Societies program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and The Keywords Project (supported by Pitt and Jesus College, Cambridge), as well as the Cambridge History of American Literature and the Oxford History of the Novel in English. In addition to writings mentioned in his contribution, his publications include many essays and The Emergence of American Literary Narrative (2005) and Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel (2011). Laura Bieger-is Professor of American Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She is the author of Belonging and Narrative (transcript 2018), which considers the need to belong as a driving force of literary production and the novel as a primary place and home-making agent. In another book, Ästhetik der Immersion (transcript 2007), she examines public spaces from Washington DC to Las Vegas that turn worldimage-relations into immersive spectacles. Her current work, to be collected in the volume Reading for Democracy (Metzler 2024), explores the relational aesthetics of socially committed art in and across different media, with a special focus on engaged literature and the reading public.- Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University. He is the General Editor of the Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011), whose contributors include Winfried Fluck. Cassuto’s most recent book (coauthored with Robert Weisbuch) is The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education-(2021), a product of his turn in recent years to the study of U.S. higher education. His next book, to be published in 2024, is titled Academic Writing as if Readers Matter. Rita Felski is John Stewart Bryan Professor of English at the University of Virginia, former Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark, and the former editor of New Literary History. Her latest books are Uses of Liter‐ ature (2008), The Limits of Critique (2015) and Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020). She is currently finishing a book called-Reading with-the New Frankfurt School. Winfried Fluck, Professor em., is former chair of American Culture at the Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of Freie Universität Berlin. He studied at FU Berlin, Harvard and UC Berkeley, taught at Konstanz, Universidad Autonoma Barcelona, Princeton, UC Irvine, Richmond and Dartmouth College, and was a research fellow at the National Humanities Center/ North Carolina, the Advanced Studies Center of the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum in Vienna, and the Freiburg-Institute for Advanced Studies. He is a founding member and former 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. His book publica‐ tions include Inszenierte Wirklichkeit. Der amerikanische Realismus 1865-1900; Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans; Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies; and, as editor, Re-Framing the Transnational Turn, and American Studies Today. New Research Agendas. Among the best-known of Stephen Greenblatt’s fifteen books are Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; The Swerve: How the World Became Modern; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve; and Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Holberg Prize, the Mellon Distinguished Humanist Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship (twice), and the James Russell Lowell Prize (twice). He is the General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and Italy’s Academia degli Arcadi. Greenblatt lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard. Heinz Ickstadt is Professor Emeritus (since 2003) of American Literature at the Kennedy-Institute for American Studies, Freie Univertät Berlin. He was Chairman of the German Association for American Studies from 1990-1993 and of the European Association for American Studies from 1996-2000. He has written studies on modern American poetry as well as on American fiction of the 20 th Century, and his essays are collected in Faces of Fiction and Aesthetic Innovation and the Democratic Principle. Frank Kelleter is Chair of the Department of Culture and Einstein Professor of North American Cultural History at the John F. Kennedy Institute for 482 Contributors North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. His research centers on the American Enlightenment, cultural theory, and American media and popular culture since the nineteenth century. His most recent publications include Culture ² : Theorizing Theory for the Twenty-First Century (ed. with Alexander Starre, 2022), Media of Serial Narrative (2017), David Bowie (2016), and Serial Agencies: The Wire and Its Readers (2014). Susanne Rohr is Chair of North American Literature and Culture at Univer‐ sität Hamburg. Her research at Stanford University, Harvard University and New York University was supported by grants of the DAAD and Fulbright, among other institutions. She taught at Smith College, Stanford University, Fudan University, Shanghai, and at the University of Wyoming. Susanne Rohr has published widely in the fields of literary and cultural theory, semiotics, American pragmatism, epistemology, and on a broad range of topics in Amer‐ ican literature. Susanne Rohr was awarded an “opus magnum” stipend by the Volkswagen Foundation to finish her book on representations of the Holocaust in a comparative perspective in the US and Germany, Von Grauen und Glamour: Repräsentationen des Holocaust in den USA und Deutschland, which was published in 2021 by Winter Verlag. Ramón Saldívar is professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2012 and serves on the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His teaching and research focus on the areas of literary criticism and literary theory, 19 th , 20 th and 21 st century literary studies, the history of the novel and other narrative forms, issues concerning transnationalism, globalization and decolonization, critical race theory, comparative studies in race and ethnicity, and U.S. Latinx Studies. He is the author and editor of four books and numerous other scholarly publications. In 2006, he was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize in US Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies for his book, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Duke 2006). Peter Schneck is Professor and Chair of American Literature and Culture at Osnabrück University, and currently the director of the Institute for English and American Studies. Publications include The U.S. and the Questions of Rights (Heidelberg 2020; co-ed.); Rhetoric and Evidence: Legal Conflict and Literary Representation in American Culture (Berlin 2011), as well as articles on property and narrative, cognition and aesthetics, as well as cultural creativity in global copyright spheres. He is the founding director of the Osnabruck Summer Contributors 483 Institute for the Cultural Study of the Law (OSI) and has been leading a research group at Osnabrück University on the formation of literary property within the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1385) “Law and Literature,” hosted by the WWU Münster and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). His current research and teaching is concerned with human rights, legal subjectivity and global literatures of migration, flight and dislocation. Philipp Schweighauser is Professor of North American and General Literature at the University of Basel. He is the author of three monographs: Boasian Verse: The Poetic and Ethnographic Work of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead (Routledge 2023), Beautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art (U of Virginia P 2016), and The Noises of Amer‐ ican Literature, 1890-1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics (UP Florida 2006). He has co-edited-Boasian Aesthetics: American Poetry, Visual Culture, and Cultural Anthropology, a special issue of Amerikastudien/ American Studies (2018) and seven additional essay collections. He is the creator of the Massive Open Online Course “Literature in the Digital Age.” His research interests include 18 th to 21 st c. American literature and culture; literary history, literary, cultural, and media theory; literature and science; literature and anthropology; life writing; sound studies; and aesthetics. Johannes Voelz is Professor of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics at Goethe-University, Frankfurt. He is the author of Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge (UP New England 2010) and The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat (Cambridge UP 2018). He is the founding co-director of the research focus, “Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World,” at Frankfurt’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities - the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften - and of its public outreach platform, the “John McCloy Transatlantic Forum.” Currently he is at work on a study of the aesthetics of populism. 484 Contributors