Hester Baer
Hester Baer is Associate Professor and Head of Germanic Studies at the University of Maryland, where she also serves as a core faculty member in the Film Studies and Comparative Literature programs. She has published widely on gender and sexuality in film and media; historical and contemporary feminisms; and German literature and culture in the 21st Century. She is the author of Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language (2009) and the co-editor, with Alexandra Merley Hill, of German Women’s Writing in the 21st Century. Publications on digital feminisms include “Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics, and Neoliberalism” (Feminist Media Studies, 2015) and “Digital Feminisms and the Impasse: Time, Disappearance, and Delay in Neoliberalism,” co-authored with Carrie Smith and Maria Stehle (Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2016). Baer has served as the President of the South Central Modern Language Association and the President of the Coalition of Women in German. She is currently completing a book, German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism, 1980-2010.
Simone Pfleger
Simone Pfleger (PhD 2018, Washington University in St. Louis) is Assistant Professor of Gender and German Studies in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research is grounded in gender and queer theoretical methodologies and engages with notions of temporality, political subjectivity, affect, intimacy, and precarity in post-2000 German-language literature, film, and culture. She currently works on a monograph on queer temporality and aesthetics in the cinema of the Berlin School.
Christina Scharff
Christina Scharff is Senior Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. Her research interests are in gender, media, and culture with a special focus on neoliberalism and subjectivity. Carrie Smith, Maria Stehle, and Christina co-edited the Feminist Media Studies special issue and subsequent book ‘Digital Feminisms: Transnational activism in German protest cultures’. Christina is also author of Repudiating Feminism: Young Women in a Neoliberal World (Ashgate, 2012) and, most recently, Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work: The Classical Music Profession (Routledge, 2018). She co-edited (with Rosalind Gill) the books New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (with Ana Sofia Elias and Rosalind Gill) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Carrie Smith
Carrie Smith is Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of German Studies at the University of Alberta with interests in digital feminisms, just futures, art activism, popfeminism, and affective publics. She is coauthor of Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism (with Maria Stehle, 2016), author Revolting Families: Toxic Intimacy, Private Politics, and Literary Realism in the German Sixties (2013), and articles on contemporary feminisms and German culture. She has coedited five peer-reviewed collections, including Digital Feminisms (2016) and Crossing Central Europe (2017), and three international journals: Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies (2010–2018), Women in German Yearbook (2015–2017), and Seminar (2017–2022). She has received awards for teaching and research. ResearcherID: C-8725-2018. Twitter: @drcarriesmith
Maria Stehle
Maria Stehle is Associate Professor of German and Chair of the Interdisciplinary Program in Cinema Studies at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Her publications include a monograph entitled Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Cultures (2012), book chapters, and articles in the fields of German, Media, Film, and Gender Studies. Her most recent co-authored book (with Carrie Smith-Prei) Awkward Politics: The Technologies of Popfeminist Activism was published in May 2016. She is currently working on a book manuscript in collaboration with Beverly Weber entitled Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary European Cinema and is part of a research group on “Speculative Feminisms.”
Pinar Tuzcu
Pinar Tuzcu (Dr. phil.) holds a postdoc position and teaches at the Department of Sociology of Diversity at the University of Kassel, Germany. She is the author of the book titled ‘Ich bin eine Kanackin’ Decolonizing Popfeminism (2017). One of her recent articles appeared in Feminist Media Studies’ Special Issue on Digital Feminisms with the title “Allow access to location? Digital Feminist Geographies” (2016). She is currently co-editing a special issue for Women’s Studies International Forum on the intersection of antifeminist discourse, racism and austerity politics in Europe. Her research interests include contemporary feminisms and queer theory, postmigration studies, decolonial approaches and speculative methodology. She is currently working on a project “Mobile Feminisms in Speculative Times.”
Beverly Weber
Beverly Weber, PhD is Associate Professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is author of the book Violence and Gender in the “New” Europe: Islam in German Culture and has published widely on gender, race, feminism, Islam, and refugee migration in Germany. She is the founder of the Just Futures Working Group, a transnational working group of antiracist feminist scholars; a steering committee member of the feminist German studies professional organization Women in German; and co-editor of the digital media project Feminist Scholar Activism and the Politics of Affect. Her current book manuscripts in progress are on the racialization of human rights in contemporary discussions of refugee activism, and on the representations of intimacy in contemporary European cinema (with Maria Stehle). Her publications can be accessed here.