Verena Laschinger teaches American Literature at the University of Erfurt, Germany. From 2005 to 2010 she was employed as Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at Fatih University Istanbul, Turkey. She holds a Ph.D. from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany, and participated in the 1997 School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, Ithaca, USA. Her research interests include Turkish-American literature and American urban literature and photography. She is also a founding member of the European Study Group of Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Sirpa Salenius, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in English-language literature and culture at the University of Eastern Finland. Previously she worked as Project Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo and taught at American university study abroad programs in Rome and Florence. Her conference presentations, lectures, and publications focus on Transatlantic Studies; her more recent work looks at race, gender, and sexuality. Her books include An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), Rose Elizabeth Cleveland: First Lady and Literary Scholar (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and essay collections: Race and Transatlantic Identities (Routledge, 2017), co-edited with Elizabeth T. Kenney and Whitney Womack Smith, and Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women's Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World (University of New Hampshire Press, 2016), co-edited with Beth L. Lueck, and Nancy Lusignan Schultz.
