Travel, Agency, and the Circulation of Knowledge (Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship) - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Gesa Mackenthun is professor of American Studies at Rostock University, Germany. Her books include Metaphors of Dispossession. American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire (1997), Fictions of the Black Atlantic (2004), and the co-edited volumes Decolonizing ‘Prehistory’. Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (with Christen Mucher, 2021), Sea Changes. Historicizing the Ocean (with Bernhard Klein, 2004), Entangled Knowledge. Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference (with Klaus Hock, 2012), and DEcolonial Heritage: Natures, Cultures and the Asymmetries of Memory (with Aníbal Arregui, 2017). Her current research deals with representations of the transatlantic history of enclosures, evictions, and ecocide.

Andrea Nicolas is a Social Anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher. She received her PhD from Free University Berlin. She has worked at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle and, in the realm of the International MaxNetAging Programme, for the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, and has also been affiliated to the Graduate School of “Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship” at the University of Rostock. In recent years, she has carried out extensive fieldwork in Northeast Africa, among the Oromo and Amhara groups of Ethiopia. Her research interests include communication, ritual, age, generation, mediation and conflict resolution, along with issues of discourse analysis, comparative research and research methodology. She is the author of the book From Process to Procedure: Elders’ mediation and formality in Central Ethiopia (Wiesbaden 2011), and co-editor of the volume Growing up, Growing old: Trajectories of Time and Lives (Oxford 2013, with Ian Flaherty).

Stephanie Wodianka is Professor of Romance Literature at Rostock University, Germany since 2010. Her research interests – documented in several monographies and books – include representations, practices and theories of the collective memory (littérature, films, chanson française), the European meditative literature of the seventeenth century, the relations between aesthetics and the construction of (trans)cultural identities (especially in the context of the Grand tour), and concepts and poetics of modern myth. Since 2013 she has been chairing the interdisciplinary doctoral program on Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship, and she is currently working on a project on cultural semiotics of the cardinal directions, Localisations de l’Europe: sémiotiques culturelles des points cardinaux, edited by Stephanie Wodianka and Sebastian Neumeister (2016).

Mary Baine Campbell is a Professor of English at Brandeis University, where she also teaches in Comparative Literature, Women’s and Gender Studies and the Creative Writing program. She is the author of The Witness and the Other World: European Travel Writing 400–1600 and Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (which won the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for Best Book), along with two books of poetry. More recently she has been studying early modern dreams and dream theory in English, French, Huron, Iroquois and Abenaki societies; she is at work on a related book under the title Dreaming, Motion, Meaning: Oneirics of the Atlantic World, 1550–1750.

Gabriele Dürbeck is professor of literature and culture studies at University of Vechta since 2011. She is author of the book Stereotype Paradiese. Ozeanismus in der deutschsprachigen Südseeliteratur, 1815–1914 (2007) and editor of the special focus on “Writing Catastrophes: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Semantics of Natural and Anthropogenic Disasters,” Ecozona. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 3.1 (2012). Her recent books are Postkoloniale Germanistik. Bestandsaufnahme, theoretische Perspektiven, Lektüren (edited with Axel Dunker, Bielefeld 2014) and Ecocriticism. Eine Einführung (edited with Urte Stobbe, Köln 2015). She is currently working on the Metzler handbook Postkolonialismus und Literatur (edited with Dirk Göttsche and Axel Dunker), a volume on Ökologischer Wandel in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts (2017), and a volume on Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture (2017).