Winfried Fluck is Professor of American Culture at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of Freie Universität Berlin. He is a founding member and former director of the Graduate School for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Co-Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College. His most recent publications are Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies (2009), Towards a Post-Exceptionalist American Studies, edited with Donald Pease (2014), and American Studies Today: New Research Agendas, edited with Eric Redling, Sabine Sielke and Hubert Zapf (2014).
Ulrike Gehring is Professor of Art History at the University of Trier with a focus on modern art and new media. Her latest publications deal with the iconic status of scientific pictures in the art of the early modern period and modernity, notably Mapping Spaces: Networks of Knowledge in 17th Century Landscape Painting, edited with Peter Weibel (2014) and Die Entdeckung der Ferne. Natur und Wissenschaft in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (editor, 2014).
Gerd Hurm is Professor of American Literature and Founding Director of the Trier Center for American Studies at the University of Trier (TCAS). He is the author of studies on modern American city fiction (Fragmented Urban Images, 1991) and nineteenth-century realism (Rewriting the Vernacular Mark Twain, 2003). He has edited books on American politics and presidential rhetoric (with Paul Goetsch, The Fourth of July, 1992; Important Speeches by American Presidents, 1994) and post-World War II literature and culture (with Ann Marie Fallon, Rebels without a Cause, 2007). In 2014, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Trier Center for American Studies, Hurm organized an international symposium on Edward Steichen’s The Bitter Years in Dudelange, Luxembourg.
Martin Jay is Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his BA from Union College and his PhD from Harvard University. His many publications include The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–50 (1973) and Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993).
Miles Orvell is Professor of English at Temple University. His research areas include American literature and culture, with special interests in realism and modernism, as well as visual culture, urbanism and technology. Orvell’s research in recent years has focused on the cultural significance of space, and his 2012 study of Main Street explored the complex and contradictory cultural meanings of the small town at the same time that it problematized the icon of Main Street. His current research is on the cultural meaning of ruins, and he is looking at the representation of archeological ruins, industrial ruins, urban ruins, atomic ruins, and other sites of destruction, primarily using the lens of photographic representation. His many publications include The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (1989) and American Photography (2003), a volume in the Oxford History of Art series.
Benjamin Paloff is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Lost in the Shadow of the Word (Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe) and of the poetry collections And His Orchestra and The Politics. Professor Paloff is also the translator of several books and shorter works from Polish, Czech, and Russian.
Anke Reitz is Curator for Photography at the Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA) in Luxembourg since 2005 and head of the Steichen Collections held at the institute. She studied visual communication with a focus on audiovisual arts in Liège and Paris and art history in the UK. Further specialization brought her to photography conservation and visitor-centred art mediation.
Eric Sandeen is Professor of American Studies at the University of Wyoming and Director of the Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research. He is the author of Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (1995) and several articles on the international tour of Steichen’s massive exhibition, the most recent of which looks at the September 1955 installation in Guatemala City. He first saw the Family of Man images in Clervaux in 1989. Sandeen has held five Fulbright lectureship positions. In autumn 2014 he was Senior Fulbright Professor at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Kerstin Schmidt is Professor of American Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstaett, Germany. She is the author of The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama (2005) and has published on modern American drama, ethnic literatures in the US and Canada, the Harlem Renaissance, theories and cultures of diaspora as well as on media theory/radio studies and visual culture studies, especially on documentary photography. She also co-edited the essay collection America and the Sea (2004) and has edited and contributed to Space in America: Theory History Culture (2005). Her current research projects include ‘Negative Space and the Making of Modern America: Concepts of Space in American Literature, Architecture, and Photography’, as well as ‘The Literature of Relation: Reconceptualizations of the Black Atlantic and Diasporic Writing’.
Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is co-editor with Greil Marcus of A New Literary History of America (2009), and his major book publications include Beyond Ethnicity (1986), Neither Black nor White yet Both (1997), Ethnic Modernism (2008) and The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s (2014). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea.
Shamoon Zamir is Associate Professor of Literature and Visual Studies and the Director of Akkasah, the Center for Photography at New York University Abu Dhabi. He has previously taught at the University of Chicago, the University of York and the University of London. Zamir works in the areas of literature, photography and intellectual history. His book The Gift of the Face explores the relationship of aesthetics and ethics in the work of the early twentieth-century photographer Edward S. Curtis and examines the ways in which image and text, art and science, pictorialist photography and anthropology come together in Curtis’s portraits of Native Americans. Zamir is co-editor of The Photobook (2012) and has in addition published on twentieth-century African American and Native American fiction and on modern poetry, and has translated short stories from Urdu.