Editorial

Dr. Alexandra Ganser holds an M.A. in English and American Studies and History from the University of Vienna. She also studied at the University of Trieste and the University of Oklahoma at Norman on a Fulbright grant. She has recently completed her doctorate in American Studies at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, where she is an assistant professor. Her dissertation, forthcoming with Rodopi in 2008, is entitled “A Road of Her Own: Gender, Space, Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970-2000“ and grew out of her fellowship with the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg “Kulturhermeneutik im Zeichen von Differenz und Transdifferenz“ at the University of Erlangen. Her new project will focus on narratives of transatlantic piracy. She has published mainly in the fields of mobility studies, gender studies, Native American studies, and film.

Katharina Gerund, M.A., has studied American Cultural Studies, Theater and Media Studies as well as Psychology at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. She also received a DAAD fellowship to spend a year as a graduate student in Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Since 2007, she is a doctoral fellow at Bremen University and is working on her dissertation project on African-American women writers / activists and their role in the transatlantic cultural exchange between Afro-America and Germany as well as their reception in (West-)Germany since World War II. Her research interests include African-American culture and literature, transatlantic cultural traffic, film, and poetry.

Christina Judith Hein graduated from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg with an M.A. in American Literary and Cultural Studies and Theatre and Media Studies. She also studied at the University of Kansas in Lawrence and took classes at Haskell Tribal Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. She is presently an associate colleague of the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg “Kulturhermeneutik im Zeichen von Differenz und Transdifferenz“ and is working on her doctoral dissertation dealing with representations and negotiations of Whiteness in contemporary Native American literature. She has published in the areas of multicultural education, film, comic books, and gender studies and is further interested in issues pertaining to cultural contact and exchange as well as in queer studies.