Dr Barbara Braid is Assistant Professor of English at the Institute of Literature and New Media, University of Szczecin, Poland. Her research interests circle around neo-Victorianism, the Gothic, adaptation, and popular culture studies. She has recently published articles and chapters on biofiction, for instance, “Biofiction and the Neo-Victorian Crime Novel: The Case of the Brontës” in The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); “Queering the female writer in screen biofictions: Daphne (2007) and Shirley (2020)” in Neohelicon (2024), and “Queer heritage and strategic humour in recent screen biofictions of Emily Dickinson,” co-written with Dr Anna Gutowska and published in Neo-Victorian Studies in 2024. She is currently working on a number of neo-Victorian projects, including a monograph on heterochronic spaces in neo-Victorian media and an article on biographemes of Edgar Allan Poe in comic books. She has also been a convenor of the online lecture series Neo-Victorian Television (2024).
Dom Ford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bremen, where he is a part of the Media and Religion lab in the ZeMKI Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research. His current research focuses on how communities in digital games are formed, maintained and negotiated between players and developers. He also works on worldbuilding and mythmaking in digital media more broadly. His first book, Mytholudics: Games and Myth will be published with De Gruyter in 2025. Dom is also an editor for the diamond open access journals gamevironments and Eludamos, for which he has been longlisted for the Enter Open Access 2024 Award in the ‘Young Talent’ category. For more, see domford.net.
Heike Paul is chair of American Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg and director of the Bavarian American Academy in Munich. She received her degrees from Goethe University Frankfurt and Leipzig University. In 2018, she was recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation.
She held fellowships at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, and the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. Twice, she was Visiting Harris Professor at Dartmouth College. She currently leads the “Global Sentimentality Project” and the Research Training Group “The Sentimental in Literature, Culture, and Politics” at FAU. Among her publications are The Myths That Made America (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014); Understanding Stewart O’Nan (Chapel Hill: University of South Carolina Press, 2020); Amerikanischer Staatsbürgersentimentalismus: Zur Lage der politischen Kultur der USA (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021); and Lexicon of Global Melodrama (ed. with Sarah Marak, Katharina Gerund, and Marius Henderson, Bielefeld: transcript, 2022).