Victoria Aarons holds the position of Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature in the English Department at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. Her many publications include A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction (1996) and What Happened to Abraham: Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction (2005), both recipients of the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book, and the coedited volume The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (2015), a finalist for the 2015 National Jewish Book Award. She is a contributor to the two-volume Encyclopedia of Holocaust Writers, and she was an invited speaker at the eightieth birthday celebration/symposium for Elie Wiesel. She is a judge of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, a prize awarded each year to a rising American Jewish writer of fiction. She has published well over seventy articles and book chapters, and her work has appeared in a number of scholarly venues. She is on the editorial board of Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and Women in Judaism. She is the recipient of the Piper Professor Award for Outstanding Scholarly and Academic Achievement and the Z. T. Scott Faculty Fellowship for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching and Advising. Aarons has been invited to speak at a number of public venues, including Florida Atlantic University’s Center for the Study of Values and Violence after Auschwitz and Purdue University’s seventh annual Larry Axel Memorial Lectureship in Religion. She is currently editing the Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow, and her book on third-generation literary representation of the Holocaust is forthcoming.
Pilar Alonso is an associate professor of English linguistics in the English Department at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her main fields of research are discourse analysis and discourse coherence and cognitive linguistics with a special interest in literary discourse analysis. She has published numerous articles on semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive aspects of literary works by North American and British authors; among them are “The Conceptual Integration Network Model as a Paradigm for Analysis of Complex Narrative Discourse” (2004), “A Cognitive Approach to Short Story Writing” (2012), and “The Role of Cognitive Coherence in Non-expert Processes of Literary Discourse Reception” (2014). She is the author of A Multi-dimensional Approach to Discourse Coherence: From Standardness to Creativity (2014) and has coedited Aspects of Discourse Analysis (2002) and translated and edited I. B. Singer’s book Un amigo de Kafka y otros relatos (1990).
Alan Astro is a professor of modern languages and literatures at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas. He is the author of over thirty articles on writers as diverse as Bashevis, Baudelaire, Beckett, and Borges; a recent piece, published in Partial Answers, is a new reading of Elie Wiesel’s Night in its English, French, and Yiddish versions. Astro is the editor of Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Yiddish Writing; and his translation of Éric Marty’s Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” has recently been published.
Rémi Astruc is a professor of comparative and Francophone literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, France. He is codirector of the research group Agora (literature and social sciences) and founding member of CCC (community of scholars working on community). After completing his Ph.D. thesis on identity in Jewish American contemporary novels and films (Bellow, Malamud, Roth, and Woody Allen), he has specialized in the analysis of different forms of humor, writing two essays and many articles on the grotesque. His research currently focuses on the question of community and its contemporary expressions in art.
Emilio Cañadas Rodríguez teaches English and literature at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Education at Camilo José Cela University in Spain, where he is also the director of the International Education and Bilingualism master’s program. Since 2010, he has served as head of the English Studies Department. His research focuses on the American contemporary short story, and he has published book chapters, articles, and essays on Truman Capote, Tim Gautreux, Bernard Malamud, and Raymond Carver, among others. He is also literary coeditor of Verbeia: Journal of English and Spanish Studies.
Leah Garrett is the Loti Smorgon Research Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture at Monash University. She has published four books and numerous articles on Jewish literature. Garrett’s scholarship has been devoted to understanding how Jewish authors in an array of languages use their literary discourse to enact, reimagine, and subvert conventional ideas about the relationship between Jews and the modern world. Her most recent book, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel, was a finalist for the 2015 National Jewish Book Award.
Andrew M. Gordon is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Florida. His publications include An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer; Psychoanalyses/Feminisms, coedited with Peter Rudnytsky; Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness, coauthored with Hernan Vera; and most recently, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. He also has eighty-five essays and thirty-five reviews on Jewish American writers such as Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Ozick, and Kosinski; on other contemporary writers such as Barth and Pynchon; and on American science-fiction novels and films.
Till Kinzel received his Ph.D. (2002) and habilitation (2005) from the Technical University of Berlin. He has published books on Allan Bloom (Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika, 2002), Nicolás Gómez Dávila (2003, 4th enl. ed. 2015), Philip Roth (Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens, 2006), and Michael Oakeshott (2007). Most recently, he has edited a number of writings and translations by Johann Joachim Eschenburg and coedited Imaginary Dialogues in English (2012) and Imaginary Dialogues in American Literature and Philosophy (2014; both with Jarmila Mildorf), as well as Johann Joachim Eschenburg und die Künste und Wissenschaften zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik (2013) and a book on the reception of Edward Gibbon in Germany (2015; both with Cord-Friedrich Berghahn). Jessica Lang is an associate professor of English and the Newman Director of the Wasserman Jewish Studies Center at Baruch College, CUNY. Her primary areas of interest are in Holocaust literature and Jewish American fiction.
Holli Levitsky is the founder and director of the Jewish Studies Program and professor of English at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Her research and scholarship focus on Holocaust representation and questions of (Jewish) identity, especially as it relates to exile and displacement. Most recently, she is the coeditor of The Literature of Exile and Displacement: American Identity in a Time of Crisis (2013) and Summer Haven: The Catskills, the Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, an edited collection of literature and essays on the experience of the Holocaust in the Catskill mountain resorts, hotels, and bungalow colonies in upstate New York (2015).
Paul Malamud was born in 1947 in New York City to Ann and Bernard Malamud and grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, and Bennington, Vermont. He attended the Cambridge School of Weston and Yale College and received a Ph.D. in British literary studies at Columba University. After 1980, he lived in Washington, D.C., and worked as a writer and editor. His poems and translations from French and Latin have appeared in magazines.
Félix Martín Gutiérrez is a professor of English and American literature at the Complutense University (Madrid, Spain). As a Fulbright scholar in Austin, Texas (1972–75) and visiting professor at Yale (1984) and Stanford (1987), he was able to concentrate his research interests in literary history and critical theory, mainly applied to American literature and American studies. His latest book, published in Spanish, Retorno a la historia literaria norteamericana (2014) surveys recent speculations on literary history and critical pedagogy in the States. As specialized topics, he has published essays on Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, W. H. Auden, Margaret Atwood, Grace Paley, Adrienne Kennedy, and Arthur Miller.
Timothy Parrish, a professor of English at Virginia Tech University, is the author of Walking Blues: Making Americans from Emerson to Elvis (2001), From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction (2008), and Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America (2012). He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (2007) and The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists (2013). He has published widely on contemporary American literature in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, Studies in Jewish American Literature, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Shofar, and Prospects.
Gustavo Sánchez Canales teaches English at the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he is also vice dean for research and innovation. He served as vice dean for international relations between 2011 and 2013. From 1999 to 2010, he taught English and U.S. literature at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His research focuses on contemporary Jewish American literature. He has published book chapters, articles, and essays on Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Potok, Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, and Michael Chabon, among others. He has coedited with Victoria Aarons a thematic volume on Philip Roth titled History, Memory, and the Making of Character in Roth’s Fiction. He has also coedited with Victoria Aarons a forum titled “Saul Bellow as a Novelist of Ideas” in Partial Answers.
Aristi Trendel is an associate professor at the Maine University, Le Mans, France, where she offers courses in American civilization. She has taught American literature and creative writing for several years at the School of Management of Strasbourg. Her doctoral dissertation focused on John Updike’s short fiction. She has published articles on American writers (John Updike, Philip Roth, Flannery O’Connor, Henry James, Jeffrey Eugenides, Rikki Ducornet, Djuana Barnes, and others) in the Psychoanalytic Review, the John Updike Review, Philip Roth Studies, the Columbia Journal of American Studies, the Journal of the Short Story in English, the EJAS, and the Baltic Journal, among others; book reviews; and fiction in literary magazines. She is the author of four books of fiction.
Theodora Tsimpouki is a professor at the Faculty of English Studies, University of Athens. She studied at the University of Athens, the Sorbonne, and New York University, from which she received her Ph.D. Her essays have appeared in English and Greek in numerous journals and edited collections, including Post-Exceptionalist American Studies (2014), States of Emergency / States of Crisis (2011), Philip Roth and World Literature (2014), East-Central European Traumas and a Millennial Condition (1999), Women in Dialogue: (M)uses of Culture (2008), On the Road to Baghdad, or, Travelling Biculturalism (2005), and Revisiting Crisis / Reflecting on Conflict: American Literary Interpretations from WWII to Ground Zero (2008). Her published works also include Culture Agonistes: Debating Culture, Re-reading Texts (coeditor, 2002), Conformism, Non-Conformism and Anti-Conformism in the Culture of the US (coeditor, 2008), and Our America: American Culture in Greece (2010, in Greek). She has been book reviews editor of the Journal of the European Association for American Studies (EJAS) since 2000.
Martín Urdiales Shaw is an associate professor in the Department of English, French and German at the University of Vigo, Spain, where he has been teaching since 2000. He belongs to the NETEC research group (Textual and Cultural Negotiations), which is part of the network Rede de Investigación en Lingua, Literatura inglesa e Identidade, funded by the Galician autonomous administration (Xunta de Galicia). He has specialized in the fields of Jewish American narrative, 1930s urban fiction, and more recently, graphic novels and Holocaust studies. His main publications include a monograph on Bernard Malamud’s work (Ethnic Identities in Bernard Malamud’s Fiction, 2000) and articles on the works of Malamud, Henry Roth, Michael Gold, Clifford Odets, and Tillie Olsen, among others. His more recent research has focused on Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel/memoir Maus, both in relation to the artist’s reinscription of the survivor’s discourse and as regards the translation of Vladek’s foreignized English into Spanish and other Romance languages. He has also worked on the visual in Spiegelman’s Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers, arguing the relational nature of the cartoonist’s representational strategies and the conceptual indeterminacy of Spiegelman’s post-9/11 book.