FOCUS ON GERMAN STUDIES 19 186 ABOUT THE AUTHORS LJUDMILA BILKIĆ was born in Novi Sad, Serbia and with an immediate family that spans all territories of the former Yugoslavia. Ljudmila came to the United States in 1998. A proud Bostonian for over twelve years, she holds a BA from Middlebury College, an MA from the University of Pittsburgh, and is currently a PhD candidate in German and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Ljudmila’s intellectual focus is centered on interrogating existing methods that map the phenomena of both legal and illegal [im]migration within the imagined and consistently changing borders of Europe. Of particular interest are cultural artifacts that challenge established theories on “space” and “place” in order to illustrate how the degraded or outcast individual is able to produce a type of subjectivity that allows for positive counter-hegemonic action. Ljudmila’s current publication in Slavic Studies examines an overlooked relationship between Eastern and Western Post Modernism. SYLVIA FISCHER earned her Master’s degree in German Studies, English/American Studies and business administration from the University of Potsdam, Germany, in 2004. After that, she has been working for newspaper publishing houses in Germany for 6 years. Since 2010, she is a graduate student – and, since May 2012, also a PhD candidate - of the German studies PhD program at the Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. Her research interests include post-war literature and film in East and West Germany, children’s literature, memories/memory cultures and German and Russian realism of the nineteenth century. OLIVETTA GENTILIN is from Sovizzo, Italy. She graduated in Cà Foscari University in Venice, writing a thesis on the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard. She has been teaching German since 1987, having received her Master at Verona’s University in Methodologies and Technologies of Instructions. She started a career teaching German after completing the qualifying courses for the profession of Foreign Language Teaching (FLT). She has been an online tutor and teacher trainer, counsellor and supervisor by SSIS (High School Secondary Teaching). Olivetta is also a 187 FOCUS ON GERMAN STUDIES 19 present member of ANFIS (National Association of Teachers’ Supervisors Instructors). She is currently a doctoral student in Foreign Literatures and Science of Literature at the University of Verona. Her field of research deals with Georg Büchner and the themes of illness and writing. R. ERIC JOHNSON is a PhD student at the University of Tennessee. He has also studied at Universität Stuttgart and the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie. His areas of research include German horror film and applied linguistics. KNUT LANGEWAND is a native of Nordhorn, Germany. After studying history and German at the universities of Greifswald, Berlin (FU) and University College London, he received a Magister Artium degree from the University of Greifswald. He is the author of a book on the historian Ernst Bernheim and German historical theory in the late 19th century, entitled Historik im Historismus (2009). He is currently a PhD student at the University of Warwick (Great Britain), working on a thesis on sickness metaphors in the political discourses of the Weimar Republic.His research interests include 20th century European political and cultural history, democracy and dictatorship in East Central Europe, theory of history, and the history of historiography. NATHAN MAGNUSSON is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington. His interests include nineteenth-century literature—in particular the Romantics—narrative theory, and cultural history. He is currently writing his dissertation, “Accommodating the Nation: Hospitality and State-Belonging in Nineteenth-Century German Literature,” which aims to expose a link between literary representations of the guest-host encounter and emergent discourses of citizenship in the long nineteenth century. ANNA-LISA MENCK has been studying German, media, and communication at the University of Hamburg in Germany, where she has also worked at the Research Center for Gender studies and Cultural Theory. During the 2011/12 academic year, she studied in the German Department’s Graduate Program at Washington University in St. Louis and worked as a research assistant. In 2012, after earning her Bachelor 188 degree from the University of Hamburg, she is starting a Master’s Program on German literature at the Humboldt-University in Berlin. Her academic interests include cultural theory, gender theory, narratology and German-language literature at the turn of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. GIULIA FERRO MILONE studied German and English literature in Venice and psychology in Padua and Urbino. She also completed a postgraduate scholarship at the University of Passau (Germany). She has translated narratives by Bernhard, Tieck, Hocke, Liebman and Fühmann. She is a permanent teacher of the German language and culture in Italian high schools. Since 2010, Giulia has been a doctoral student both at the University of Verona (Italy) and at the German University of Bamberg, researching the works by E. T. A. Hoffmann under the approach of Gender Studies. Her main research interests include German and European literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contemporary German literature, gender and queer studies, narratology, memories and memory culture studies. BENJAMIN NICKL is a PhD candidate in the Department of German and the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University with an emphasis in Cultural Studies and Literary Criticism. In his dissertation on contemporary Turkish German culture, Benjamin studies cultural representations and critical practices of migration, representation, and transnational mobility with regard to race and ethnicity in German society. He has been teaching classes in the German Department’s curriculum at Georgetown since 2009. In addition, Benjamin’s forthcoming academic publications include a book chapter on the German television sitcom genre and an article about the historical trajectory of the digital body in cyberpunk film. NADINE NOWROTH is a Postgraduate Student at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. In her doctoral thesis she is investigating Stasi surveillance and the literary process within writer families in the former GDR. She has presented several papers and published texts on the key findings of the project. Further research interest lies in Post-Wende literature as well as presentations of the GDR on screen, autobiographical writing and memory studies. She holds an M.A. in German Literature, English ABOUT THE AUTHORS 189 FOCUS ON GERMAN STUDIES 19 Literature and Psychology from the Freie Universität Berlin and completed her studies with a thesis on literature and censorship in Brigitte Reimann’s novel Franziska Linkerhand. Nadine Nowroth also completed a Distance Studies Course in Teaching German as a Foreign Language at the Goethe Institut and the Universität-Gesamthochschule Kassel in Germany. JARA SCHMIDT was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1984, where she studied English, German and History at the University of Hamburg. After working as a research assistant at the university, she has now turned to theater work and is currently also writing her dissertation in the field of intercultural studies. Her doctorate compares novels written by Turkish authors in Germany and Indian writers in England and focuses on themes like migration, counterculture, and masquerade.