David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He also serves as an expert witness in voting rights and death penalty cases, as a consultant to museums and public television and radio, and works with the U.S. State Department as an Academic Specialist, leading workshops on American history and culture in foreign countries.
Joannis Kaliampos is a research assistant and PhD candidate in TEFL at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. His fields of research include task-based language learning, learning with digital media, and American studies in the EFL classroom. In the 2010/11 academic year he received a Fulbright scholarship for teaching German at the University of Arkansas, Fort Smith, where he also coordinated the university’s German language program. Together with the U.S. Embassy School Election Project 2012 team he was awarded the 2013 Hans-Eberhard Piepho-Prize for innovative communicative EFL teaching.
Shana Kennedy-Salchow was an elementary school teacher before working in education policy in the U.S., most recently as the Policy Director for the Connecticut State Department of Education. She is currently a doctoral student at the Humboldt University Berlin.
Martina Kohl is a Cultural Affairs Specialist at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, Germany, where she coordinates a Germany-wide speaker as well as the curriculum development program in American Studies. Dr. Kohl frequently teaches Cultural Diplomacy courses at the Humboldt University Berlin. Together with Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, PD Dr. Maria Moss, and Prof. Dr. Torben Schmidt, Dr. Kohl edits the American Studies Journal.
Rita Nikolai is currently working as an Assistant Professor for System-related School Research at the Institute for Education Studies at the Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany. Her research interests include comparative education, especially school policy and theories of institutional change.
Torben Schmidt holds a doctoral degree in TEFL (Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 2007). He has been working as a Professor of English Didactics at the Institute of English Studies at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany (since 2011). His fields of research are Computer Assisted Language Learning, Project Work and Drama in Education. Together with the U.S. Embassy School Election Project 2012 team he was awarded the 2013 Hans-Eberhard Piepho-Prize for innovative communicative EFL teaching.
Christianna Stavroudis is a lecturer at the Chair of English Linguistics and for language instruction at Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University Greifswald, Germany. She received her B.A. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an M.Sc. in Clinical Linguistics jointly from the University of Groningen / University of Eastern Finland / University of Potsdam. Ms. Stavroudis is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in linguistics. In 2012, she participated in several teacher seminars for the U.S. Embassy School Election Project.
