Jelena Šesnić is a Professor of American Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, specialising in nineteenth-century American literature, cultural theory, and transatlantic studies. She is the author of several influential monographs, including Mračne žene, From Shadow to Presence, and the forthcoming Metafore ideologije i figure teksta: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick i američki književni studiji. Her research has appeared in international journals such as Twentieth-Century Literature and in edited volumes on the intersections of literature, economy, and cultural history. She has collaborated on eight major research projects, participated at conferences across Europe and in the United States, and served in key academic leadership roles, including Head of the Department of English and Chair of American Studies. Her longstanding contributions to the field include editorial work, organisation of international symposia, and service as an EU Commission reviewer for competitive research proposals. 

Tatjana Jukić Gregurić is a scholar of Victorian literature and transatlantic modernity whose research focuses on concepts such as Atlantic revolutions, modernity, territoriality, focalisation, Pre-Raphaelitism, and genre, as well as on the interdisciplinary dialogue between American and English studies, philosophy, and psychoanalytic criticism. She has led or participated in eight research projects relevant to the thematic scope of this project and has extensive experience collaborating with academic institutions and research networks across Europe, the United States, and China. She is a full member of the Academia Europaea, reflecting her international scholarly recognition. Currently, she serves as Chair of the Department of English Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, and as President of the Croatian Association for English Studies (HDAS). Her recent publications include contributions to The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime (2023), Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge (2022), and Orbis Litterarum (2021). 

Borislav Knežević is a researcher specialising in nineteenth-century English literature, with a particular focus on class formation and the intersections between economic history and literary representation. His published work examines how economic discourse, labour relations, and capitalist transformation shape the narrative structures and cultural imaginaries of Victorian literature. Within this project, he will continue to develop research on the industrial novel and on the self-understanding of English literary criticism in the context of the period’s historical changes. His contributions aim to illuminate how class, economy, and literary form interact across the broader transatlantic cultural sphere of the long nineteenth century. His recent publications include studies on Tennyson, Dickens, and the idiom of accounting in Victorian fiction. 

Martina Domines  is a scholar of English Romanticism whose research has focused on poets such as John Clare and William Wordsworth, particularly in relation to memory, suffering, and the cultural dynamics of the Romantic period. Building on this work, her contribution to the project examines nineteenth-century English working-class writing, with special attention to authors like Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Her research includes archival study of Holdsworth’s literary production and the influence of Chartism and the industrial novel on women’s labour writing. Through this focus, she brings a crucial perspective on the intersections of class, gender, and literary form within the wider transatlantic context of the long nineteenth century. Her recent publications include studies on Romantic poetics, infancy in de Quincey, and Wordsworth’s aesthetics of memory. 

Tihana Klepač is a specialist in nineteenth-century Australian literature, focusing on how women writers negotiated key concepts of modernity such as territoriality, the continent, the borderland, and biopolitics. Her research examines female autobiographical prose and realist short fiction as sites where subject formation, labour practices, boundary experiences, and identity dynamics unfold within the imperial setting. Within this project, she will explore three central thematic frameworks: the borderland as a space of passive existence, mobility and female subjectivity, and the continent as a symbolic and metaphorical structure of colonial epistemology. Her work brings a vital comparative perspective that situates Australian literary modernity within broader transatlantic and imperial circuits. She is the author of several monographs and studies, including Kako je prostor postao mjesto, Dancing in Red Shoes, and essays on Mary Helena Fortune and Australian nationalist narratives. 

Stipe Grgas is an eminent Americanist whose internationally recognised scholarship focuses on spatial theory and the role of geographical knowledge in American literature and culture. His research highlights the heuristic power of spatial concepts, especially when examined across disciplinary boundaries, and brings a crucial emphasis on the oceanic dimension of transatlantic modernity. Within this project, he explores how the long nineteenth century configured relationships between territory, land, and sea, offering insights into the genealogies of contemporary spatial imaginaries. His expertise provides a foundational contribution to the project’s work on the concepts of the sea, continent, borderland, and territoriality, as well as to the dialogue developed through annual project meetings and international colloquia. His major publications include Američki studiji danas: identitet, kapital, spacijalnost, Ispisivanje prostora, and influential essays on Melville and oceanic space. 

Lucija Relić is an assistant and incoming postgraduate student in the Department of English, American Studies Program, at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. Her scholarly interests span American Modernism and contemporary Croatian poetry, with a particular focus on the center-periphery dynamics within the Modernist literary movement. Her undergraduate research, completed in 2025, examined Modernist Gothic in the works of William Faulkner and Carson McCullers, as well as metaphor in contemporary Croatian poetry, with both theses accessible via the ODRAZ Repository. She also engages with Croatian literary culture as a contributor to the poetry criticism website Stilistika. Within this project, her research traces the (dis)continuity of the horror genre across the works of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, attending to the ways in which the economic, cultural, and social contexts of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped their distinctive poetics. Her work situates both authors within the broader development of the horror genre — accounting for its Gothic heritage and its late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century turn toward science fiction — while analysing formal aspects of their writing as symptoms of specific historical and cultural moments, market logic, and authorial class position. A further line of inquiry concerns the treatment of race and gender in both authors' works as evidence of the contextual pressures bearing on their literary imagination.