Ulla Haselstein is professor of American Literature (Chair) at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin. She was a research associate at the Center of Cultural Studies at UC Santa Cruz in 1993-94, a visiting professor of American Literature at UC Irvine in 2001, and an Aby Warburg Visiting Professor at the University of Hamburg at 2009. She has published widely on modernist and postmodernist literature, Native American Studies, holocaust literature, and literary theory. Her most recent book publications are the co-edited volumes The Cultural Career of Coolness (Rowman, 2013) and The Pathos of Authenticity (Winter, 2010). She is currently working on a book on Gertrude Stein. She is a recipient of an “Opus magnum” grant by the VW Foundation (2015-17) for her current book project “Gertrude Stein: Literary Portraits.”

Laura Horak is assistant professor for film studies at Carleton University. She investigates gender and sexuality in film history, with an emphasis on silent cinema and transgender, lesbian, and gay cinema cultures in the United States and Sweden. She teaches courses on film theory and historiography, passing and masquerade in cinema, sexuality in American cinema, women directors, queer Hollywood, and the body and visual technology. Her co-edited anthology, Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana University Press, 2014) won the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ Award for Best Edited Collection of 2014. Her most recent book is Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 (Rutgers, 2016). She is currently writing a book on the work of Finnish-Swedish filmmaker Mauritz Stiller titled Cinema’s Oscar Wilde: Mauritz Stiller and the Production of Modern Sexuality. 

Michael North is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. The primary focus of his teaching and scholarship is the Anglophone literature of the last hundred years, with particular concentration on race, politics, and the visual arts. He is the author of numerous books, including The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot and Pound (Cambridge, 1991), The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford, 1994), Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford, 1999), Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (Oxford, 2005), Machine-Age Comedy (Oxford, 2009), and Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago, 2013). In addition, he has published articles on modern art, literature, and politics in journals including Critical Inquiry, American Literary HistoryAmerican LiteraturePMLA and Contemporary Literature. He has received a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a UC President’s Research Fellowship, the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize (2006), and the Robert Motherwell Book Award (2014). In 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Anita Patterson is professor of English at Boston University. Her research focuses on American literature, modernism, and black poetry of the Americas, and her approach emphasizes transnational and intercultural dialogue. She published the books From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest (Oxford, 1997) and Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge, 2008). Her current book project, American Japonisme and Modernist Style, continues with the interest in transnationalism, intercultural exchange, and the American contexts of literary modernism, investigating an interdisciplinary approach in order to show how the opening of Japan, and the widening popular appeal of Japanese culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century had a formative effect on the emergence of modernism.

Andreas Reckwitz is professor of cultural sociology at the Europa-University Viadrina at Frankfurt/ Oder. Andreas Reckwitz was visiting scholar and visiting professor at Berkeley, London, Vienna, Heidelberg, Bielefeld, Freiburg and St. Gallen. In a number of books, he has pursued the aim of a ‘cultural’ theory of the social and of modernity. His publications include Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien (The Transformation of Cultural Theories, Velbrück, 2000), Das hybride Subjekt. Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne (The Hybrid Subject. From Bourgeois Modernity to Postmodernity, Velbrück, 2006) and Die Erfindung der Kreativität. Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung (The Invention of Creativity. On the Process of Aestheticization, Suhrkamp, 2012). Reckwitz’s current interests are different forms of processes of aestheticization and regimes of novelty in modern society and their impacts on cultural alienation and emancipation; the specific contribution of urban and spatial development in this context; and the general question of how to understand cultural theory as a theory of materiality, considering the fluxus of artefacts, affects and senses. He is the recipient of an “Opus magnum” grant (VW Foundation) for his current book project “Die Kulturalisierung der Gesellschaft” (“The Culturalization of Society”).