Maria-Alina Asavei
is a lecturer in Russian and Eastern European studies at the Institute of International Studies, Charles University in Prague and an independent curator of contemporary art. She has curated several international exhibitions of contemporary art and material culture. Her research interests revolve around critical theory, cultural studies, aesthetics, ethnography, memory studies and forms of artistic engagement during and after totalitarian regimes. She has published articles and book chapters for: Sternberg Press (Berlin), Romanian Journal of Political Science (Bucharest), Oxford University Press (London and New York), Art & Education (New York), Journal of Modern and Contemporary Asian Arts, ARTmargins (mit Press), Lithuanian Journal of Anthropology, and Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, among others.
Sonia Caputa
works as Assistant Professor in the Institute of Literary Studies at the University of Silesia. She holds a Ph.D. in American literature from the same university, she is a fellow of Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association Symposia, a participant of the summer Fulbright scholarship “The United States Department of State 2015 Institute on Contemporary U.S. Literature” (University of Louisville, Kentucky) and a member of the Polish Association for American Studies. She is a guest co-editor of rias Online Journal and a co-editor of Grand Themes of American Literature. She teaches contemporary American ethnic literature and the survey courses of the history of American literature.
Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru
is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Bucharest, Romania. Her main research interests are global/transnational narrative writing in English, postcolonialism, ethnic American literatures, gender studies and the area of intersection between postcolonial and postcommunist literatures. She has published articles on contemporary literatures in English, postmodernism, women’s literature, ethnic American studies and postcolonialism in journals such as The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, Contemporary Women’s Writing etc. Some of her latest books are: Between History and Personal Narrative: East-European Women’s Stories of Transnational Relocation (co-edited, Vienna and Berlin: lit Verlag, 2013) and Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English (Leiden and Boston: Brill | Rodopi, 2015).
is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Bonn on American midcentury poetry, autobiographical writing and religious poetry. He is the author of the collections Prosopopeia and Our Church Is Here, as well as individually published poems in both English and German. He has written and published essays on Derek Walcott, Thomas Bernhard, Ingo Schulze, Robert Lowell, Tracy K. Smith, and Elizabeth Bishop, and translated fiction into both English and German.
Dragoș Manea
is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Bucharest, where he teaches courses in 20th century American literature, cultural memory studies, and film studies. His main research interests include the adaptation of history, cultural memory, and the relationship between ethics and fiction. Relevant publications include “Western Nightmares: Manifest Destiny and the Representation of Genocide in Weird Fiction” (Studies in Comics 8, no. 2, 2017) and “Infantilizing the Refugee: On the Mobilization of Empathy in Kate Evans’s Threads from the Refugee Crisis” (with Mihaela Precup, A/B Auto/Biography Studies 35, no. 2, 2020). He is the recipient of the Sabin Award for Comics Scholarship (2017).
Anthony Miccoli
is a Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Philosophy program at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado. He is the author of various publications, including Posthuman Suffering and the Technological Embrace (Lexington, 2010); and “Posthuman Topologies: Thinking Through the Hoard” (Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, Lexington 2014). His work in posthumanism and postphenomenology focuses primarily on the interface between the human and the topologies the human occupies and utilizes. His current research explores gender studies and topologies of consent, specifically in the context of distributed consciousness and new materialism.
Andrei Nae
is a postdoctoral researcher and assistant lecturer at the University of Bucharest where he teaches twentieth-century American literature and game studies. In 2017 he defended his doctoral thesis titled Immersion and Narrativity in the Survival Horror Genre where he discusses the relation between narrative and immersion and how this relation informs the identity politics of horror games. He is also the principal investigator and manager of the research project “Colonial Discourse in Video Games,” and is currently working on a monograph on gender identity in survival horror video games.
is an Associate Professor in the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest, Romania, where she teaches classes on American visual and popular culture, as well as contemporary American literature and civilization. She has co-edited (with Rebecca Scherr) three special issues of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (on War and Conflict and Sexual Violence). Recent publications include “Memory, Food, and Ethics in Graphic Narratives” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food (Eds. Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien, 2018) and The Graphic Lives of Fathers Memory, Representation, and Fatherhood in North American Autobiographical Comics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Olga V. Solovieva
is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and the co-editor with Sho Konishi of Japan’s Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm (Cambria Press, 2020).