Editorial

Torsten Kathke studied American Cultural History, American Literary History, and Drama at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, graduating with an M.A. in 2006. Since 2007, he has held a position as research assistant and lecturer at the LMU’s Amerika-Institut, where he primarily teaches classes on nineteenth-century American history and the American West. His publications include essays on U.S. environmental issues, as well as on questions of democracy and media. Currently, he is working on his PhD dissertation on competing regional identities and the construction of a democratic nation in the American Southwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Sascha Pöhlmann is Assistant Professor in American Literary History at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany. He received his M.A. degree from Bayreuth University in 2004 with a thesis on identity and self in James Joyce’s Ulysses “and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow“, and continued to work there as a lecturer until 2007. His studies also took him to Trinity College Dublin and the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he has taught a term at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. He completed his PhD degree at LMU Munich in 2008. He is the author of Pynchon’s Postnational Imagination“ and the editor of Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives“. Currently he is working on “Whitman’s Topography of Beginnings“ as a member of the DFG research group “Beginnings in/of Modernity.“