Gesine Brede is associated researcher at the German-French Center Marc Bloch, Berlin. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from the Goethe University Frankfurt. In her dissertation, she analyzes the influence of DNA testing methods and contemporary political rhetoric on the formation of literary evidence, identity, and truth discourse in the narratives of the "disappeared children" of Argentina. In a postdoctoral extension, this project is being refocused in terms of Argentinean 19th century epistemologies as potential basis of today's forensic uses. She also holds a Higher Teaching Certificate of the State of Baden-Württemberg in the framework of which she elaborated a cooperative teaching unit for the Francophone Caribbean, allowing for a decolonial recontextualization of these first French colonies -- founded by French pirates.

Her current research interest lies in the analysis of Early French and Spanish travelogues. International and Piracy Law enter insightful tensions with maritime epistemologies that, along with interconfessional conflict, permit to unfold Transatlantic transfers of genre and knowledge between the Mediterranean and the Caribbean Sea.

Lukas Etter, Ph.D., holds a research and teaching position (North American Literary and Cultural Studies) at the University of Siegen, Germany. Distinctive Styles and Authorship in Alternative Comics (De Gruyter, 2021) is the result of his doctoral dissertation.

His current research focuses on the social and aesthetic dimensions of word problems in American school mathematics before 1865.

Abigail Fagan is an assistant professor at the Leibniz Universität Hannover. She is currently at the crux of two major projects: first, a monograph based on her dissertation, tentatively titled Bloat: The Radical Potential of American Temperance Discourse, which examines the power dynamics of literary representations of the drunkard in nineteenth-century American temperance fiction and non-fiction. Bloat argues that temperance is an unexpected source for nineteenth-century critiques of whiteness. 

Fagan’s second current project is a decolonial feminist critique of the university in American society. More specifically, she intends to talk back to the declension narrative that is centered by recent contributions to critical university studies by historicizing key concepts, such as “the corporatization of the university.” This project relies on literary sources that address the role and function of the university in American colonial expansion over the past three hundred years. 

Fagan’s primary research interests include critical Indigenous studies, Black studies, queer theory, feminist studies, university novels, and nineteenth-century American women’s writing. She is co-speaker of the German Association for American Studies’ Diversity Roundtable and serves on the executive board of a small, volunteer-run museum on the history of the former border between East and West Germany in Böckwitz-Zicherie.

Erin E. Forbes currently holds the role of Lecturer in African American Literature at the University of Bristol (UK). She specializes in U.S. and African American literatures of the long nineteenth century, with particular interests in Black Aesthetics, crime writing, African American intellectual history, the Gothic, and environmental humanities.

Forbes began her career as an Assistant Professor of English and African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of Wyoming (US). Her monograph, Criminal Genius: Blackness and Agency in US Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press 2022), examines how, before the passage of the 13th Amendment, the cultural, legal, and political processes that produced racialized criminalization also generated fugitive, creative possibilities that challenged white supremacist regimes.

Forbes has held Fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Huntington Library, and her article “Do Black Ghosts Matter?”, on Spiritualism in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, won the 1921 Prize for the best essay in American literature in the untenured category in 2016. She sits on the board of The Edgar Allan Poe Review and serves on the steering committee for BrANCA, the largest organisation for 19th-century American literary studies outside the US. Peculiarly for a human, Forbes is partial to both dogs and cats.

Dr. Caroline Koegler is Assistant Professor of British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Münster. Her research focuses on colonial and postcolonial studies from the long eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

Dr. Koegler's Habilitation project is entitled Emotion's Empire and the Rise of the Novel. Cultural Politics of Attaching, Grieving, and Coping in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1688–1847. She is author of Critical Branding. Postcolonial Studies and the Market (Routledge 2018) and co-editor of Locating African European Studies: Interventions-Intersections-Conversations (Routledge 2020) as well as Writing Brexit. Colonial Remains (Routledge 2021). In addition, she is a member of the DFG networks "Methodologies of Economic Criticism" and "Model Aesthetics: Between Literary and Economic Knowledge." 

Nicola Paladin teaches North American literature at “G. D’Annunzio University” at Chieti-Pescara. He holds a PhD in “Textual Sciences” at “Sapienza” University of Rome with a dissertation on the relationship between the literature of the American Revolution and the 19th-century narratives on the Independence War. He is a visiting scholar at Northeastern University.

His main research interests include 19th-century American literature, war literature, comics studies. He is currently working on a digital database, focused on mapping the circulation of US literature in the Italian literary field, with a specific interest in literary anthologies of US literature in translation.

Cameron Seglias is a collagist, poet, and scholar. Currently a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School of North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, he is completing a dissertation entitled "Settling Debt: Antislavery and Colonial Crisis, 1675-1775." This work has been supported by fellowships from the German Research Foundation (DFG), The Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Recent publications have appeared in Abwärts!, H-Soz-Kult, and The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. An upcoming project, "How I Became American: A Fiction," employs memoir, autotheory, and cultural history to interrogate the ways in which familial and national myth collide within a nexus of immigration, race, and capitalism.

Phillip James Grider is an assistant professor (Wissenschaftliche*r Mitarbeiter*in) in the North American Studies department at the University of Göttingen.

Their PhD project is concerned with nonhuman agency in the epresentation of flora, fauna, and landscapes across a number of early American textualities. Building on and drawing from postcolonial studies, new materialism, Indigenous studies, and early American botany, their project aims to show how representations of flora, fauna, and landscapes in early America vehicle more-than-human agency.  They attempt to answer how these representations are capable of sustaining discourses of hegemonic and colonial mythmaking and how their understanding as more-than-human agents is able to subvert or counter these discourses.