Astrid Fellner is Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies and Vice-President for European and International Affairs at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. After teaching at the University of Vienna, she also held the Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair at Stanford University. Her monographs include Articulating Selves: Contemporary Chicana Self-Representation (2002) and Bodily Sensations: The Female Body in Late-Eighteenth-Century American Culture (forthcoming). She has also published a series of articles and co-edited books in the fields of U.S. Latino/a literature, Canadian literature, Gender/Queer Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Susanne Hamscha works at the Austrian Fulbright Commission. Previously, she was Assistant Professor in American Studies at the University of Graz and Adjunct Lecturer at Saarland University. In 2014/15, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University where she conducted post-doctoral research on the American freak show tradition and the aesthetics of the disabled body. Her publications include the monograph The Fiction of America: Performance and the Cultural Imaginary in Literature and Film (2013) and the co-edited volume Is It ‘Cause It’s Cool? Affective Encounters with American Culture (2014).