Meet the Temporary Steering Committee!

Jiann-Chyng Tu is currently lecturer and research associate in American literature and culture at MLU Halle-Wittenberg. He received his BA in German and English at Wake Forest University (USA) and MA in American Studies (literature and culture) at HU Berlin, where he is also currently a doctoral candidate. Before joining MLU Halle-Wittenberg, he has held various teaching positions around Germany. His research interests include 19th to 21st century American literature and culture, transnational American studies, multiethnic literature of the United States, American literary history, Black internationalisms, and food studies. He is currently also one of the two postgraduate representatives to the advisory board (Beirat) of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS/DGfA).

Thomas Mantzaris is an affiliated postdoctoral researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) at the Centre for Literary & Intermedial Crossings. He is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, a Fulbright Fellow and has received the 2022 HELAAS Young Scholars Excellence Award. He is currently serving as Young Scholar Representative for the Hellenic Association for American Studies and is a co-founder of the EAAS Postgraduate and ECR Network. He is the author of Multimodal Poetics in Contemporary Fiction: Design and Experimentation in North and Central American Texts (2024) and editor of the volume Reconnections: The Humanities in a Time of Climate Change (2025). His research revolves around multimodal communication and experimental forms of narrative-building in American print-based fiction and other medial contexts.

Lea Espinoza Garrido is a postdoctoral researcher at the John-F.-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University Berlin. She previously taught at the University of Münster, Augsburg University, and the University of Wuppertal, where she completed her dissertation on “Postpost-9/11 Imaginaries” in 2025. Lea held fellowships at Vassar College, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Stanford University, and is currently working on her postdoctoral research project “(Un)Doing Trust in North American Literature and Culture: Crisis, Affect, Citizenship.” Her publications include the co-edited volumes Mobility, Agency, Kinship: Representations of Migration Beyond Victimhood (2024) and Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene (2021), the co-written monograph Rammsteins Deutschland: Pop-Politik-Provokation (2022), and a co-edited special issue of Parallax on Migrant States of Exception (2022). 

Pedro Mora-Ramírez is a PhD candidate at the University of Seville, member of the research group “Teoría y Estudios Culturales” (HUM 409), and part of the associate team of the research project “Trans-formations: Queer Practices of Use and Embodiment in post 9/11 Narratives in English” (Trans-use), PID2023-146450NB-I00I. He has been a visiting researcher at Cornell University (June-July 2025), the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies (University of Limerick October 2024-May 2025) funded by the 2024 EAAS postgraduate travel grant, and at the University of Reading (2023). Furthermore, he collaborates with SAAS Young Scholars as an associate within the Communications Team, and is Managing Editor of JACLR. His research interests include spaces, resistance, racialized vulnerability, masculinities, utopia/dystopia, Cultural Studies, Film Studies and Affect Theory.

Fritz Bommas is currently a doctoral candidate at the Ludwigs-Maximilians-University Munich, pursuing a project he began at the University of Augsburg after his M.A. degree. His dissertation, titled “What’s Real in the Capitalocene: Realist Form, Crisis and Consensus in Contemporary North American Novels,” (WT) examines possibilities and strategies of realist representation of/in the Capitalocene and its attendant crises. His research interests include the broader scope of American Realism(s), Environmental Criticism, and Extraction and Energy Studies. 

Kinga Erzepki is a PhD student in Sexuality and Gender Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK), funded by The Wolfson Foundation Scholarship. Her thesis involves dissecting piece by piece the construction of non-binary characters in mainstream American television series. Her MA research on the topic has been published in Jump Cut journal. Kinga’s interests also include the depictions of sexual taboos and medical humanities—with the latter utilizing her additional experience in nutrition and patient advocacy. Otherwise: an Americanist, dirty debater, and convenor of ROLES PGR group.