Adrián Arana-Armesto is an assistant lecturer and doctoral candidate at the University of the Basque Country (EHU), where he is a member of the REWEST research group. His doctoral research, funded by a competitive Basque Government fellowship, examines the works of Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry through the theoretical frameworks of Community Studies and Place and Space Studies. His broader research interests include American Western literature and Critical Transparency Studies. He is a member of the EAAS Postgraduate and ECR Network. His work has been published in B.A.S.: British and American Studies and REDEN: Revista Española de Estudios Norteamericanos. He also has articles in press in Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos and Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, as well as a forthcoming book chapter with Peter Lang. He is co-editing a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research (JACLR) on theories of community in literary and cultural studies. He is also the editor of the forthcoming Peter Lang volume Unravelling Myth in the Fantastic: Gender, Reimaginings and Subversion. 

Fritz Bommas is an assistant lecturer and doctoral candidate at the Ludwigs-Maximilians-University Munich, pursuing a dissertation project that examines strategies of realist representation of the Capitalocene and its attendant crises in contemporary North American novels. His research interests include American Realism(s), Environmental Criticism, and Extraction and Energy Studies. Fritz is a member of the German Association for American Studies and its Postgraduate Forum, as well as the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment.  As a member of the network’s temporary steering committee, he was responsible for the survey and the calendar, and hopes to continue the work of fostering European collaboration between ECRs in the field of American Studies.

Thomas Mantzaris is an affiliated postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Literary & Intermedial Crossings at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). He is a Fellow of Advance HE, a Fulbright Fellow, and has received the 2022 HELAAS Young Scholars Excellence Award. He is a co-founder and Steering Committee member of the EAAS Postgraduate and ECR Network and currently serves as HELAAS Young Scholar Representative. He is the author of Multimodal Poetics in Contemporary Fiction: Design and Experimentation in North and Central American Texts (2024) and editor of Reconnections: The Humanities in a Time of Climate Change (2025) and Writing the New Twenties (2026). His research revolves around multimodal communication and experimental narrative forms in American/Anglophone fiction, US politics, and other medial contexts.

Dr Jenkinson (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7113-6077) is a researcher in literature, with a specific focus on settler-colonial and Indigenous studies. Her work explores the interaction between creative productions, political activism and historical abuses of power. Her AHRC-funded PhD, Educational Gothic: Interrogating Violent Educations in Australian, Canadian and United States Fictions 1960-present, explored creative responses to abusive education in a comparative study across the three nations. Currently, Jade copy-edits for the University of Wales Press’s Gothic Literary Studies Series and works as Partnerships, Placements and Engagement manager for Midlands4Cities doctoral training partnership based at the University of Nottingham. She believes strongly in the importance of global collaboration and in fellowship, particularly in light of academic precarity.

Katharina Röder (she/her) is a research assistant and doctoral candidate in American Studies at TU Dortmund, Germany. After she received her M.A. in Applied Literary and Cultural Studies at TU Dortmund, she worked for two years at the University of Regensburg as a lecturer in American Studies, before returning to Dortmund in 2025. Her research is focused on gender and queer studies, with a special interest in contemporary literature, popular culture, speculative fiction and theatre. Additionally, she has recently been elected as the equal opportunities officer for the cultural studies department. 

Maria Ilaria Tonelli is a Ph.D. Candidate in Digital Humanities and North American Literature at the University of Turin, Italy. She is a former Fulbright VSR at Northeastern University in Boston and an Erasmus+ Visiting Ph.D. Candidate at the John F. Kennedy Institute (Freie Universität) in Berlin. Her research seeks to bridge traditional literary criticism and modern digital culture. She is interested in Postmodern fiction and has published on Don DeLillo and Philip Roth. Her Ph.D. dissertation employs mixed methodologies—combining literary analysis with digital humanities tools—to examine how online communities negotiate democratic practices through US literary and cultural works. Tonelli also serves as Co-Chair of the AISNA Graduate Forum.

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.

Thomas Mantzaris is an affiliated postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Literary & Intermedial Crossings at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). He is a Fellow of Advance HE, a Fulbright Fellow, and has received the 2022 HELAAS Young Scholars Excellence Award. He is a co-founder and Steering Committee member of the EAAS Postgraduate and ECR Network and currently serves as HELAAS Young Scholar Representative. He is the author of Multimodal Poetics in Contemporary Fiction: Design and Experimentation in North and Central American Texts (2024) and editor of Reconnections: The Humanities in a Time of Climate Change (2025) and Writing the New Twenties (2026). His research revolves around multimodal communication and experimental narrative forms in American/Anglophone fiction, US politics, 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 and member of the research group “Teoría y Estudios Culturales” (HUM 409). 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 the Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research (JACLR). His research interests include masculinities, spaces, resistance, utopia/dystopia, Cultural Studies, Film Studies and Affect Theory.

Fritz Bommas is an assistant lecturer and doctoral candidate at the Ludwigs-Maximilians-University Munich, pursuing a dissertation project that examines strategies of realist representation of the Capitalocene and its attendant crises in contemporary North American novels. His research interests include American Realism(s), Environmental Criticism, and Extraction and Energy Studies. Fritz is a member of the German Association for American Studies and its Postgraduate Forum, as well as the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment.  As a member of the network’s temporary steering committee, he was responsible for the survey and the calendar, and hopes to continue the work of fostering European collaboration between ECRs in the field of American 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.