Zbigniew Białas
is Professor of English in the Institute of Literary Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland) and author of five novels. He was Humboldt Research Fellow in Germany, Rockefeller Fellow in Italy and Fulbright Senior Fellow in the USA. His academic books include Post-Tribal Ethos in African Literature (Die Blaue Eule, 1993), Mapping Wild Gardens (Die Blaue Eule, 1997) and The Body Wall (Peter Lang, 2006). His first novel, Korzeniec (MG, 2011) was awarded Silesian Literary Laurels and was turned into a successful theatrical play. Białas edited/co-edited twelve academic volumes, wrote over sixty academic essays and translated English, American and Nigerian literature into Polish.
Manuela Borzone
is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Nebraska Wesleyan University. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with an interdisciplinary advanced certificate in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on genre formation, popular print culture, and national identity in the Southern Cone. Current and future projects include “Argentina’s Outlaws and the Revisionist Western. The Case of Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Hugo Pratt’s Sargento Kirk” for the volume The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) and “Modestia Aparte: Women’s Rights in the First All-women Feminist Murga in Argentina,” for Spectacular Uprisings: Gender, Sexuality, and Performance in Latin America and the Caribbean (under contract with University of Michigan Press). She is currently working on a monograph on the continuity of the nineteenth-century gaucho genre into the present.
Flavia Brizio-Skov
is Professor of Italian at the University of Tennessee where she teaches modern literature and cinema. She has written numerous articles that appeared in Italian, American, French, Spanish and Portuguese journals. She has published a book on Lalla Romano and a critical monograph on Antonio Tabucchi. She has edited a collection of articles entitled Reconstructing Societies in the Aftermath of War: Memory, Identity, and Reconciliation (Bordighera Press, 2004). She is the author of Popular Italian Cinema: Culture and Politics in a Postwar Society (I.B. Tauris, 2011) and Ride the Frontier: Exploring the Myth of the American West on Screen (McFarland & Company, 2021).
teaches New Zealand and American literature at the University of Auckland. In his published work, he has focused on the dynamics of the cross-cultural frontier and the problems of settling a “new” world. American writers that have attracted his interest include Herman Melville, Willa Cather and Phillip Roth. His most recent books are The Settler’s Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand (Auckland University Press, 2011) and a scholarly edition of Alexander Aitken’s war memoir, From Gallipoli to the Somme (Auckland University Press, 2017).
Neil Campbell
is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of Derby, U.K. He published an interdisciplinary trilogy of books on the post-war American West: The Cultures of the American New West (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), The Rhizomatic West (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), and Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). He is co-editor of the book series “Place, Memory, Affect” with Rowman Littlefield International, and has a volume within it, Affective Critical Regionality (2016). He edited Under the Western Sky (University of Nevada Press, 2018), a collection of essays on the fiction and music of Willy Vlautin and has just completed a new book Worlding the West (University of Nevada Press, 2022).
Christopher Conway
is Professor of Spanish at the University of Texas at Arlington. His current projects are in Borderlands Studies, Comparative Literature, and American Studies, with a primary focus on representations of the American West in literature and popular culture. Conway is the author of the books Heroes of the Borderlands: The Western in Mexican Film, Comics, and Music (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: A Cultural History (Vanderbilt University Press, 2015), and The Cult of Bolivar in Latin American Literature (University Press of Florida, 2003). Other book length-publications include a volume he co-edited with Antoinette Sol titled The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), and the edited volumes The U.S. Mexican War: A Binational Reader (Hackett Publishing, 2010), and Peruvian Traditions (Oxford University Press, 2004).
Samir Dayal
is Professor of English and Media studies at Bentley University. His most recent books include New Cosmopolitanisms, Race, and Ethnicity (DeGruyter, 2019), co-edited with Ewa Łuczak and Anna Pochmara, and the monograph Dream Machine: Realism and Fantasy in Hindi Cinema (Temple University Press, 2015).
Joel Deshaye
is Associate Professor of Canadian literature and film at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Originally from the West, he received his Ph.D. from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he taught his first course on the genre of the Western. His move to the East Coast stimulated his writing of his new book, The American Western in Canadian Literature (University of Calgary Press, 2022). He is also the author of The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955–1980 (University of Toronto Press, 2013).
Johannes Fehrle
has published a number of articles and book chapters on the Western. His other research interests include Canadian and U.S. literature, adaptation and media franchising, popular media like comics and video games, and critical theory, particularly Marxism and Bourdieuian sociology. His most recent publications include, among others, a chapter in the Weird Westerns anthology (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) as well as the volume Adaptation in the Age of Media Convergence (University of Amsterdam Press, 2019; co-edited with Werner Schäfke-Zell). Two books are forthcoming: Deautomating the Future: Marxist Perspectives on Capitalism and Technology (co-edited with Marlon Lieber and J. Jesse Ramirez; under contract with Brill) and Postmodern Gunslingers in a Transnational West (under contract with the University of Nebraska Press). Currently he also works on a monograph about the depiction of the connected exploitation of work and nature in North American literature that includes chapters on Frank Norris and Leslie Marmon Silko.
MaryEllen (Ellie) Higgins
is Associate Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University, Greater Allegheny. Her books include The Western in the Global South (coedited with Rita Kerestezi and Dayna Oscherwitz, Routledge, 2015), and Hollywood’s Africa After 1994 (Ohio University Press, 2012). She has published articles in Research in African Literatures, African Literature Today, African Studies Review, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Journal of
Emily Hind
is a Fulbright scholar and Professor of Spanish at the University of Florida, where she received a University of Florida Term Professorship for distinguished record of research and scholarship, 2016–2019. She was voted Professor of the Year 2016–2017 and 2018–2019 by the graduate students in the Hispanic literature program. Hind is the author of Dude Lit: Mexican Men Writing and Performing Competence, 1955–2012 (University of Arizona Press, 2019), which received honorable mention for Best Book in the Humanities 2019 from the Mexico Section of Latin American Studies. Her third book of interviews, Literatura infantil y juvenil: Entrevistas (Peter Lang, 2020) gathers 22 conversations with writers and editors of children’s and young adult literature in Mexico. She has also published Femmenism and the Mexican Woman Intellectual from Sor Juana to Poniatowska: Boob Lit (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). She is currently writing a book that views oil and plants at the same time, using examples drawn from Mexican literature and film.
Shelly Jarenski
is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. She has published articles on the African American West in Resilience and Western American Literature, and articles on the relationship between visual culture and narrative aesthetics in MELUS, American Quarterly, and in the edited collection Where Is All My Relation? The Poetics of Dave the Potter, edited by Michael Chaney (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her book, Immersive Words: Mass Media, Visuality, and National Literature, 1839–1893 was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2015.
Rachel Leket-Mor
has a Master of Arts in translation studies from Tel Aviv University and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Arizona. She is the editor-in-chief of Judaica Librarianship, a journal dedicated to Jewish studies librarianship, book history, and cultural stewardship. In 2004, she established the IsraPulp Collection of Hebrew-language popular literature at Arizona State University Library, where she serves as the open stack collections
Warren Motte
is Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado Boulder. He specializes in contemporary French literature, with particular focus upon experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question. In 2015, the French Republic named him a Knight in the Order of Academic Palms for career service to French culture. His most recent books include Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (Dalkey, 2008), Mirror Gazing (Dalkey, 2014), French Fiction Today (Dalkey, 2017), and Pour une littérature critique (Zea Books, 2021).
Andrew Nette
holds a Ph.D. from Macquarie University and is an independent scholar and writer of fiction and non-fiction. He is co-editor of Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980, and Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1956 to 1980, both published by PM Press. His third co-edited book, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950–1985, will be released by PM Press in 2021. He is author of Rollerball (Auteur Publishing in partnership with Liverpool University Press), and he is currently working a history of the post war Australian pulp fiction publisher, Horwitz Publications, scheduled for publication in 2022.
Marek Paryż
is Associate Professor of American Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. He serves as the chief editor of the Polish Journal for American Studies and the senior editor for literature and culture of the European Journal of American Studies. He is the author of The Postcolonial and Imperial Experience in American Transcendentalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). His current research focuses on film and literary Westerns, and he has a special interest in their transnational varieties. He has co-edited a collection of essays titled The Post-2000 Film Western: Contexts, Transnationality, Hybridity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) as well as special issues of the journals Papers on Language and Literature, “The Visual Language of Gender and Family in the Western” (2018), and Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, “Degeneration of Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Cinematic Depictions of the U.S. West” (2020).
is Professor of American Literature at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain). He is the author of El proceso de la violencia en la narrativa de Robert Penn Warren (University of the Basque Country Press, 1995), Robert Laxalt: The Voice of the Basques in American Literature (Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, 2007) and New Literary Portraits of the American West: Contemporary Nevada Fiction (Peter Lang, 2014). He has also co-edited five volumes on the literature of the American West and the special issue of the journal Western American Literature on “Writing the Global Western” (2019). David Rio coordinates an international research group (REWEST) specialized in the literature and culture of the American West.
Steffen Wöll
is Postdoctoral Fellow at Leipzig University’s collaborative research center SFB 1199 “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition.” He has published articles on various and intersectional topics from the perspective of American Studies, including spatial imaginations, border studies, naturalism, as well as film and horror studies. Wöll is the author of The West and the World: Imagining, Formatting, and Ordering the American West in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Discourse (de Gruyter, 2020). His current research project investigates transoceanic dynamics of the United States’ imperial and literary discourses.
Sergei I. Zhuk
is a Professor of History in the Department of History at Ball State University. A former Soviet expert in U.S. history, especially in the social and cultural history of colonial British America, Professor Zhuk moved to the United States in 1997. He taught American colonial history, Russian/Soviet and Ukrainian histories at the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University. His research interests include international relations, knowledge production, cultural consumption, religion, popular culture, and identity in imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine. His publications include The KGB Operations against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine, 1953–1991 (Routledge, 2022), Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSR: People’s Diplomacy in the Cold War (Lexington Press, 2017), Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Johns Hopkins University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010), and Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 (Johns Hopkins University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004).