C o n t r i b u t o r s Rachel Adams is professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, USA. She specializes in the literatures of the United States and the Americas, disability studies and health humanities, theories of transnational- ism and globalization, media studies, and theories of race, gender, and sexual- ity. Her most recent book is Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery (2013). She is also the author of Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (2009) and Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (2001) and the coeditor of a special issue of Comparative American Literature on “Canada and the Americas.” Her articles have appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, American Quarterly, Signs, Yale Journal of Criticism, and Twentieth-Century Literature. She has also written for The New York Times , Salon , The Times of London , and The Chronicle of Higher Education , and she blogs regularly for the Huffington Post . See also http://english.columbia.edu/people/profile/369. Mita Banerjee is professor of American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. Her research interests include postcolonial literature ( The Chutneyfication of History: Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee and the Postcolonial Debate , 2002), ethnic American literature ( Race-ing the Century , 2005), and the American Renaissance ( Ethnic Ventriloquism: Literary Minstrelsy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature , 2008). She has edited the collection Virtually American? Denationalizing North American Studies (2009). Banerjee is director of the Center for Comparative Indigenous Studies at the University of Mainz. She has just completed working on a project that explores the intersection between naturalism and naturalization in nineteenth-century American fiction. See also http://www.amerikanistik.uni-mainz.de/254.php. Georgiana Banita is assistant professor of Literature and Media Studies at the University of Bamberg in Germany and an honorary research fellow at the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney. Her monograph Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11 , which proposes an ethical approach to post-9/11 literature, was published in 2012. Banita is most inter- ested in issues regarding contemporary North American writing especially after 9/11, globalization, energy cultures and oil fictions, economic and politi- cal approaches in American and Canadian Studies, war, ethics, human rights, and American visual culture (film and photography). Her work has appeared among others in Textual Practice , LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory , Biography , 337 338 Contributors and Critique . She is currently completing her second monograph, a transna- tional literary history of the North American oil industry. See also http://www. uni-bamberg.de/germ-lit-medien/personen/dr-phil-georgiana-banita/. Julia Breitbach is a literary scholar working at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her monograph Analog Fictions for the Digital Age: Literary Realism and Photographic Discourses in Novels after 2000 , which deals with the role of photographic discourses in contemporary literature from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, was published in 2012. Breitbach has coedited an interdisciplinary special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik titled “Crossroads: Canadian Cultural Intersections/Carrefours: Intersections Culturelles au Canada” and published articles and book chapters on photog- raphy and materiality studies, Margaret Atwood’s poetry, the Canadian mod- ernist short story, contemporary city fiction by Canadian women writers, and Raymond Carver’s short story oeuvre. Jutta Ernst, professor and chair of American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany, is the author of Edgar Allan Poe und die Poetik des Arabesken (1996) as well as coeditor of “Je vous écris, en hâte et fiévreusement”: Felix Paul Greve—André Gide. Korrespondenz und Dokumentation (1999) and The Canadian Mosaic in the Age of Transnationalism (2010). She has published on contempo- rary American poetry, literary journalism, genre theory, and the translation and mediation of literature. Her most recent work includes articles on Native American cultures and she is working on a book-length study on the making of literary modernism. See also http://www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/amerikanistik /50.php. Florian Freitag is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. His monograph The Farm Novel in North America: Genre and Nation in the United States, English Canada, and French Canada, 1845–1945 was published in 2013. Freitag has coedited an interdisciplinary special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik and is currently coediting a collection on transcultural dynamics as well as a special issue of the European Journal of American Studies on transnational approaches to North American regionalism. His work has also appeared in Amerikastudien/American Studies , American Literary Naturalism , Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien , and Canadian Literature . Freitag is currently working on his second monograph, which will examine representa- tions of New Orleans in various media from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. See also http://www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/amerikanistik/56.php. Monika Giacoppe is associate professor of Comparative World Literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA. Her primary research interests lie in the Contributors 339 fields of the literatures of the Americas as well as Francophone literatures. Giacoppe has published several articles and book chapters on translation studies and the literatures of the Americas, most recently “‘Lucky to Be So Bilingual’: Québécois and Chicano/a Literatures in a Comparative Context” (reprinted in Canada and Its Americas 2010). With Christiane Makward, she is currently translating Moi, Jeanne Castille de Louisiane , the autobiography of a fervent advocate for the French language and Acadian heritage in Louisiana. Eva Gruber is assistant professor (tenured) of North American Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her research interests include Native North American literatures and film, conceptualizations of “race” in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, and the field of literature and terror- ism. In addition to publishing a monograph, Humor in Native North American Literature: Reimagining Nativeness (2008), she coedited Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives (2012) and edited Thomas King: Works and Impact (2012). She has published several articles and book chapters on Native writing and film in the United States and Canada, on the politics of translation, on space in Caribbean-Canadian writing, and on racial identities in contempo- rary American fiction. She is currently working on a monograph titled “The Realities of Race: Black and White in the American Novel after 2000.” See also http://www.litwiss.uni-konstanz.de/fachgruppen/anglistikamerikanistik. Christina Kannenberg completed her BA with High Distinction at the University of Toronto in 2003, including a year spent studying at Université Laval in Quebec City on a C. D. Howe scholarship. After working and travel- ing in Quebec and around Europe she settled in Konstanz, Germany, where she completed her MA in 2010. For her Master’s thesis, titled “‘The Winter Is Killing Me’: English-Canadian and Québécois Short Stories on the North,” she received the VEUK Prize for one of the best MA exams of the year in the humanities at the University of Konstanz in 2010 as well as a DAAD award as an outstanding foreign student. Kannenberg is completing her PhD disserta- tion at the University of Konstanz in the field of comparative English Canadian and Québécois urban fiction on a Brigitte Schlieben-Lange scholarship from the government of Baden-Württemberg. Her first article, titled “The North Comes South: Seasonal Nordicity in Montreal in the Short Stories of Monique Proulx and Clark Blaise,” was published in an interdisciplinary special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Jean Morency is professor of French Canadian Literature at the University of Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. Morency’s main fields of interest lie in the literary relations between Quebec and the United States as well as the “améri- canité” of francophone Canadian literatures. He has published several articles, 340 Contributors book chapters, and books on the role of American myths in North American literatures ( Le mythe américain dans les fictions d’Amérique, de Washington Irving à Jacques Poulin , 1994; La littérature québécoise dans le contexte américain, 2012), the relevance and impact of American literature in Quebec and Acadia (“L’américanité et l’américanisation du roman québécois: réflexions conceptu- elles et perspectives littéraires,” 2005; “Les visages multiples de l’américanité en Acadie,” 2006), and francophone North American literatures (coed., Des cultures en contact: Visions de l’Amérique du Nord francophone , 2005; Romans de la route et voyages identitaires, 2007). See also http://web.umoncton.ca/umcm-crcl/ Chaire/CV-Jean_Morency.html. Reingard M. Nischik is professor and chair of American Literature at the University of Konstanz in Germany. She is the author or editor of some twenty- five books as well as numerous articles and book chapters on Canadian, American, and Comparative Literature, and was one of the very first scholars