Notes on Contributors
Norbert Bachleitner
is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna/Austria. His fields of interest include literary translation and transfer studies; social history of literature; book history; censorship; literature in periodicals; intertextuality, and digital literature. His most recent book publications are (together with Christine Ivanovic) Nach Wien! Sehnsucht, Distanzierung, Suche. Literarische Darstellungen Wiens aus komparatistischer Perspektive (2015), Die literarische Zensur in Österreich von 1751 bis 1848 (2017) and (together with Ina Hein, Karoly Kókai and Sandra Vlasta) Brüchige Texte, brüchige Identitäten. Avantgardistisches und exophones Schreiben von der klassischen Moderne bis zur Gegenwart (2018).
Ottmar Ette
is Chair of Romance Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He is honorary member of the Modern Language Association of America (mla), member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and regular member of the Academia Europaea. His fields of interest include the research on Theory and practice of the Literatures of the World, TransArea Studies and Literature as Life Science. Among his most recent publications available in English are Transarea: A Literary History of Globalization (2016) and Writing-between-Worlds: TransArea Studies and the Literatures-without-a-fixed-Abode (2016).
Paul Ferstl
is an Austrian novelist, literary scholar (PhD in Comparative Literature, University of Vienna 2017, with a thesis on Authentizitätsfiktionen der Fingierten: Die US-amerikanische Professional Wrestling-Autobiografie), and scientific publisher. Currently in charge of Peter Lang’s Vienna office, he will join the fwf research project “Ludwig Tieck’s Library” as a post-doc in 2020. His most recent book publication is Fischsitter (Milena Verlag, 2018).
Stephanie M. Hilger
is Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century British, French, and German culture, with an interest in interdisciplinary approaches to literature. She is the author of Women Write Back (2009) and Gender and Genre (2014). She is also the (co-)editor of The Early History of Embodied Cognition (2015), New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies (2017), and Bodies in Transition in the Health Humanities (2019).
Achim Hölter
is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna/Austria. His fields of interest cover European Romanticism, thematics, historiography of literature and the fine arts, aesthetic metareference, comparative arts, reception and canonisation, praxeology of literary studies, book history and libraries as cultural representations. He organised the xxi. Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, the proceedings will be published in 2020 (The Many Languages of Comparative Literature).
Barbara Korte
is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg/Germany. She has worked on British literature and culture from the Victorian period to the present. Current fields of interest are travel writing, the cultural memory of World War i, cultures of the heroic and Periodical Studies. Her latest book publication is Geheime Helden: Spione in der Populärkultur des 21. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017).
Stefan Kutzenberger
is a freelance writer, curator and lecturer for Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna/Austria. He was a founding member of the Austrian research community’s task force “Wissenschaft und Kunst”. Numerous publications on the visualization of literature, on intermediality in Vienna around 1900 and on the literary relationship between Europe and Latin America.
John A. McCarthy
is Professor of German and Comparative Literature Emeritus at Vanderbilt University. His research interests include the European Enlightenment and its legacies, literature and law, philosophy and literature, science and literature, book history, readership studies, and Wissenschaftsgeschichte. His recent publications include the edited volumes The Early History of Embodied Cognition 1740–1920: The Lebenskraft-Debate and Radical Reality in German Science, Music, and Literature (2016) and Shakespeare as German Author: Reception, Translation Theory, Cultural Transfer (2018).
Agnes C. Mueller
is College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. Her most recent publications are The Inability to Love: Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature (Northwestern UP, 2015; in German Die Unfähigkeit zu lieben, Koenigshausen und Neumann, 2017) and, edited with Katja Garloff, German Jewish Literature After 1990 (Camden House, 2018). She has published widely on recent and contemporary German literature, poetry, and Holocaust remembrance.
Carl Niekerk
is Professor of German, Comparative and World Literature, and Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign. His fields of interest include literature and culture of the European Enlightenment; the early history of anthropology; music and literature; culture and mobility; Austrian culture and literature, and comparative Dutch studies. He is currently the editor of The German Quarterly and the Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch. His most recent edited volume is The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective (2018).
Manfred Pfister
was Professor of English at the Freie Universität Berlin. He was co-editor of the Shakespeare Jahrbuch and Poetica and author of Das Drama. Theorie und Analyse (Munich, 1982; Engl. cup, 1988). More recent titles among his many other book publications are Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Transactions (2008), Shakespeare’s Sonnets Global, A Quatercentenary Anthology (2009, 2014) and editions such as Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Buriall and Selected Writings (2014). He is also a translator and as such one of the German voices of Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound (The Cantos, 2012).
Dobrota Pucherová
is senior researcher at the Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences, and lecturer in African and comparative literature at the University of Vienna. Her research interests include postcolonialism, migrant and transnational writing, world literature theories, feminism and women’s literary history. Among her books are The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing (2011) and Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures, co-edited with Róbert Gáfrik (2015). Her forthcoming book will be on contemporary Anglophone African women’s writing.
Christoph Schmitt-Maaß
is research assistant of German Literature at Ludwig Maximilians-University Munich. His fields of interest include cultural transfer through translation; intertextuality; social and religious history of literature and history of literary criticism. His most recent book publications are Kritischer Kannibalismus. Eine Genealogie seit der Frühaufklärung (2019) and Fénelons ‘Télémaque’ in der deutschsprachigen Aufklärung (1700–1832) (2018).
Annette Simonis
is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gießen/Germany and president of the German Association of General and Comparative Literature. Her fields of interest include Modernism and avantgarde, intermediality (literature, arts and music), cultural transfer, history of knowledge and imagination, genre studies, and fantastic literature. Her most recent book publications are (together with Peter von Möllendorff and Linda Simonis) Figures of Antiquity and their Reception in Art, Literature and Music (2016), and Das Kaleidoskop der Tiere. Zur Wiederkehr des Bestiariums in Moderne und Gegenwart (2017).
Daniel Syrovy
is Senior lecturer at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. With research mainly focused on Early Modern literatures in the Romance languages, German, and English, he is currently working on narrative traditions and the materiality of textual transmission in the Spanish libros de caballerías. Tilting at Tradition. Problems of Genre in the Novels of Miguel de Cervantes and Charles Sorel (2013) was published in ifavl. A book-length study of Habsburg Censorship in Lombardy-Venetia is forthcoming.
Sandra Vlasta
is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie-Fellow at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (
Juliane Werner
is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her principle areas of research are concerned with anglo-, franco-, and germanophone cultural transfer, philosophical fiction, Word and Music Studies, and Medical Humanities. She is the author of Thomas Bernhard und Jean-Paul Sartre (2016) and an upcoming book on the reception of French Existentialism in Austria (Existentialismus in Österreich. Kultureller Transfer und literarische Resonanz).
Russell West-Pavlov
is Professor of Anglophone Literatures at the University of Tübingen and Research Associate at the University of Pretoria. Recent book publications include Eastern African Literatures: Towards an Aesthetics of Proximity (oup, 2018) and German as Contact Zone: Towards a Quantum Theory of Translation from the Global South (Narr-Francke-Attempto, 2019). He has also edited The Global South and Literature (cup, 2018).
Werner Wolf
is Professor and Chair of English and General Literature at the University of Graz/Austria and Vice Director of the Centre for Intermediality Studies at Graz (cimig). Main research areas: literary theory (aesthetic illusion, narratology, metafiction/metareference), functions of literature, 18th- to 21st-century English fiction, intermediality studies. Recent book publications: Selected Essays on Intermediality (2018) and the co-edited volumes Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media (2013), Silence and Absence in Literature and Music (2016), Meaningful Absence across Arts and Media: The Significance of Missing Signifiers (2019).
Gianna Zocco
is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie-Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin (ZfL), where she works on a book project on the images of Germany and its history in African-American literature. Before she was a “Universitätsassistentin” at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. Her work focuses on African-American and German literature, with a particular interest on cultural concepts of space, imagology, intertextuality, reception studies, and theories of cosmopolitan memory in literature. Recent publications concern James Baldwin, Nella Larsen, and the motif of the window in contemporary literature.