Renée Ater is associate professor and associate chair in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. She holds a B.A. in art history from Oberlin College, and earned a M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the University of Maryland. Her scholarship and teaching focuses on American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a specialization in African American visual culture. She is the author of Keith Morrison, volume 5 of The David C. Driskell Series of African American Art (Pomegranate Books, 2005) and Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (University of California Press, 2011). Her new book project entitled Unsettling Memory: Public Monuments to the Slave Past in the United States considers the flurry of monument building to commemorate slavery, resistance, and emancipation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in American cities in the South, Midwest, and Northeast
Birgit Däwes is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, and Director of the University of Vienna’s Center of Canadian Studies. Her publications include Native North American Theater in a Global Age (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), Ground Zero Fiction: History, Memory, and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel (Heidelberg: Winter, 2011), as well as the editions Indigenous North American Drama: A Multivocal History (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), Enacting Nature: Ecocritical Perspectives on Indigenous Performance (with Marc Maufort, Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014), and the special issue Narratives of Fundamentalism (LWU 46.2–3 [2014]). She is also co-founder and co-editor (with Karsten Fitz and Sabine Meyer) of the brand new Routledge book series “Transnational Indigenous Perspectives.” In addition to Native American and First Nations Studies, drama and performance, and representations of terrorism, her research focuses on surveillance culture, contemporary American television series, and issues of transnational cultural memory.
Erika Doss is professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame where she teaches courses in modern and contemporary American art and cultural studies. Her most recent book is Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (University of Chicago Press, 2010). She is co-editor of the “Culture America” series at the University Press of Kansas, and on the editorial boards of Public Art Dialogue and Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief. Her current book project is “Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth Century American Artists and Religion.”
Ingrid Gessner is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany. Her most recent book is situated in the medical humanities and explores the cultural dimension and representation of yellow fever in nineteenth-century U.S.-American literature and visual culture. She is the author of Collective Memory as Catharsis? The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Public Controversy (2000) and of the award-winning From Sites of Memory to Cybersights: (Re)Framing Japanese American Experiences (2007). She co-edited a special issue on Iconographies of the Calamitous in American Visual Culture (Amerikastudien/American Studies 58.4/2013). Further publications include articles on 9/11, eco-photography, and the transnational turn in American Studies. She has served as assistant editor of Amerikastudien/American Studies and as editor of the e-journal COPAS (Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies).
Franklin Odo is the John Jay McCloy Visiting Professor of American Institutions and International Diplomacy at Amherst College. He was Founding Director of the Asian Pacific American Center at the Smithsonian Institution and Chief of the Asian Division, Library of Congress. Odo was on the faculty when Asian American Studies was established at UCLA. He has taught at the University of Hawai’i, University of Pennsylvania, Hunter College, Princeton, and Columbia. His book, No Sword to Bury: Japanese Americans in Hawai’i during World War II, was published by Temple University Press in 2004; he edited the Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience in 2002. Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai’i was published by Oxford in 2013. He has a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies and a Distinguished Service Award from the Asian American Justice Center. Odo was Humanist in Residence at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities at Brown University in April 2013. He currently leads a “Theme Study on Asian American Pacific Islanders” for the National Historic Landmarks Project of the National Park System and is a member of the Curriculum and Training Committee of the National Council on Public History.
Andrew Shanken is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley. His book, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Homefront, examines anticipatory designs for postwar architecture and cities created during World War II. He has published widely on the topic of architecture and memory, including a current project called “Memorials No More,” about the everyday life of memorials in cities. He has just published Into the Void Pacific, a history of the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair.
Klara Stephanie Szlezák is a post-doctoral researcher in American Studies at Passau University, Germany, and a visiting assistant professor in American Studies at Osnabrück University, Germany, during the summer term 2015. She holds a doctoral degree in American Studies from Regensburg University (2014). Her areas of research and publication include American Jewish history, literature, and culture, immigration history, photography and visual culture, film as well as tourism and museum studies. Her monograph “Canonized in History”: Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Writers’ Houses in New England and the co-edited volume Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen are forthcoming in 2015.
