Carol Anne Costabile-Heming is a professor of German in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of North Texas. She received her PhD in German from Washington University in St. Louis and has distinguished herself as a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature and culture. She has published widely on Wende literature and post-Wende Berlin, including (with Rachel Halverson and Kristie Foell) Textual Responses to German Unification: Processing Historical and Social Change in Literature and Film (De Gruyter, 2001) and Berlin: The Symphony Continues; Orchestrating Architectural, Social and Artistic Change in Germany’s New Capital (De Gruyter, 2004). She has also published essays and book chapters on the authors Volker Braun, F. C. Delius, Jürgen Fuchs, Günter Grass, Günter Kunert, Erich Loest, Peter Schneider, and Christa Wolf, as well as on censorship and the Stasi in the GDR. Most recently she coedited (with Rachel Halverson) the volume Taking Stock of German Studies in the United States: The New Millennium (Camden House, 2015). In 2018 the Southern Conference on Language Teaching awarded her the Educator of Excellence Award.
Cheryl Dueck is an associate professor of German and senior academic director international at the University of Calgary, Canada. Her areas of research are Central European cinema; GDR and postunification literature and film; cultural memory; surveillance; and cultural and gender politics. Recent work includes articles and book chapters on German, Hungarian, Polish, and Czech films, such as The Lives of Others, Little Rose, In the Shadow, The Exam, Yella, Jacob the Liar, November Child, Winter Daughter, and American Rhapsody. Her current project, together with Balázs Varga (ELTE, Budapest), is titled “National Pasts-Transnational Presence: Post-Socialist Cinema of Central Europe.” She is the author of Rifts in Time and in the Self: The Female Subject in Two Generations of East German Women Writers (Rodopi, 2004).
Julie Fedor is a senior lecturer in modern European history at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Russia and the Cult of State Security (Routledge, 2011); coauthor of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012); contributing coeditor of Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in Post-Socialist States (Routledge, 2013) and War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Palgrave, 2017); and coeditor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave, 2013). In 2010–13 she was a postdoctoral researcher on the Memory at War project based in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge (www.memoryatwar.org). She has taught modern Russian history at the Universities of Birmingham, Cambridge, Melbourne, and St. Andrews. Her research on memory and authoritarianism in Putin’s Russia was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Research Award.
Valentina Glajar is a professor of German at Texas State University and an accredited external researcher at the Romanian CNSAS (National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives). She is the author of The German Legacy in East Central Europe (Camden House, 2004) and coeditor (with Bettina Brandt) of Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), (with Jeanine Teodorescu) Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), (with Domnica Radulescu) “Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and Vampirettes, Wretches, and Amazons: Western Representations of East European Women (East European Monographs; Columbia University Press, 2004). She has also translated (with André Lefevere) Traveling on One Leg (Northwestern University Press, 1998; 2nd ed., 2010) by the Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller. Glajar’s latest book, coedited with Alison Lewis and Corina L. Petrescu, is Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing (Camden House, 2016). As a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, she is currently working on a monograph, “The Afterlife of Files: Herta Müller’s Story of Surveillance.”
Lisa Haegele is an assistant professor of German at Texas State University. She completed her PhD in German and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis in 2014. Her research covers postwar through contemporary German cinema with a special focus on West German genre films in the 1960s and 1970s. Her work has appeared in the special issue “1968 and West German Cinema,” edited by Christina Gerhardt, in The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture (2017), Berlin School Glossary: An ABC of the New Wave in German Cinema (Intellect, 2013), and The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art-Cinema, edited by Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher (Wayne State University Press, 2018). She is currently working on a monograph on violence and politics in West German genre films in the “long 1968,” in addition to an article on the aesthetics of 1970s feminist underground comix in Ziska Riemann’s Lollipop Monster. Her research has been supported by the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies.
Axel Hildebrandt is an associate professor of German at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His research topics include GDR literature and film; contemporary German literature, film, and politics; questions of memory; and transnational studies. His coedited volume Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture (with Jill E. Twark) was published by Camden House in 2015.
Alison Lewis is a professor of German in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published widely in the areas of modern German literature and German studies, mainly on gender, literature and politics, the German Democratic Republic, German unification, and the history of intellectuals. She is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as three single-authored monographs: Subverting Patriarchy: Feminism and Fantasy in the Works of Irmtraud Morgner (Berg, 1995), Die Kunst des Verrats: Der Prenzlauer Berg und die Staatssicherheit (Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), and Eine schwierige Ehe: Liebe, Geschlecht und die Geschichte der Wiedervereinigung im Spiegel der Literatur (Rombach, 2009). Her coedited book with Valentina Glajar and Corina L. Petrescu, Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing (Camden House, 2016), has been well received. She recently coauthored a monograph with Birgit Lang and Joy Damousi, A History of the Case Study: Sexology, Psychoanalysis and Literature (Manchester University Press, 2017). She is coeditor of the Australian yearbook for German studies Limbus (Rombach) and the monograph series Transpositionen with Röhrig-Universitätsverlag and currently serves as president of the German Studies Association of Australia. She has just completed a monograph on secret police informants, A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informants and the Surveillance of Culture in East Germany (forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press). In 2018 she was a fellow of the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, a center for advanced studies at the University of Cologne.
Jennifer A. Miller is an associate professor of modern European history at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. She has published on postwar guest-worker immigration to Germany and is the author of Contested Borders and Hidden Lives: The First Generation of Turkish Guest Workers in Postwar Germany (University of Toronto Press, 2018). Her research has been supported by the DAAD, Fulbright, and the Berlin Program in Advanced German and European Studies, among others.
Corina L. Petrescu is an associate professor of German at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Against All Odds: Subversive Spaces in National Socialist Germany (Peter Lang, 2010) and of various articles on Volker Braun, Eginald Schlattner, representations of 1968 in the Romanian media, and Yiddish theater in Romania. She is the coeditor with Valentina Glajar and Alison Lewis of Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing (Camden House, 2016) and of the Monatshefte special issue “Archive und Geheimdienstakten: Dialogisches Erinnern an Verfolgung und Zensur im Ostblock” (2018). She is a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University Potsdam, Germany, working on a cultural history of the Jewish State Theater Bucharest from 1948 to the present.
Mary Beth Stein is an associate professor of German and international affairs at George Washington University. She has published on Berlin, the Berlin Wall, East German memory culture after 1989, and Florian von Donnersmarck’s film Das Leben der Anderen. She is currently working on a book-length monograph, “The Lives of East Germans: Experience, Identity and Memory after the Wall,” and has written a recent article on narratives of detention in the tours at the Stasi prison of Berlin-Hohenschönhausen.