Notes on Contributors

Marco Caracciolo is associate professor of English and literary theory at Ghent University. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, the philosophy of mind, and the environmental humanities, his work explores the forms of experience afforded by narrative in literary fiction and other media (especially video games). He is the author of several books, including most recently Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality (2023).Hilary Duffield is emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Trier. Her main research focus is on cognitive approaches to narrative and representations of environmental crisis, particularly invasion narratives and interspecies conflict. She has published articles in journals including Narrative, Current Writing, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Interventions, and Sprachkunst. Her book Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (published under her former name, Hilary Dannenberg) won the Barbara and George Perkins award for the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in 2010. Her most recent publication is “Cognitive Challenge in Complex Science Fiction: Knowledge, Reason, and Threat in Narratives of Time Travel and Extraterrestrial Contact” (in Puzzling Stories: The Aesthetic Appeal of Cognitive Challenge in Literature, Film, and Television, 2022).Melanie Kreitler is a postdoc in the Department of Anglophone Literary, Cultural, and Media Studies at the University of Giessen. Her book Mental Illness and Narrative Complexity: An Experiential Approach to Puzzle Films and Complex Television will be published in 2025. Her research interests include narrative complexity across media, with an emphasis on films and video games; critical approaches to empathy; and the intersections of cultural and media discourses. She is coeditor of the special issues “Illness, Narrated” (On Culture, 2021), “Queer Politics in Media and Legal Cultures” (Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2024), and “Mental TV: Changing the Narratives of Mental Disorders on Television” (Series, 2025).Adrienne N. Merritt is assistant professor in German at the University of Colorado Boulder whose research and teaching interests range broadly from late medieval beguine mysticism to Black German hip-hop, poetry, and activism, including the question of identity and ways in which marginalized identities shed light on broader concepts of home, modernity, and belonging. Her work is interdisciplinary—focusing on historical and philological methodologies as well as sociology and cultural anthropology—and crosses linguistic and modern national borders. Recent publications have appeared in German Quarterly, Monatshefte, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty- First Literatures and Languages, and MLN.Brian Richardson teaches at the University of Maryland. His most recent works include A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives (2019), Essays on Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts (2021), The Reader in Modernist Fiction (2024), and the anthology Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges, coedited with Jan Alber (2020). His website is https://brianerichardson.weebly.com.Wibke Schniedermann is an Americanist at Ghent University. She is the author of Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels and coeditor of Towards Legality and Affect (with Birte Christ), Surveillance Cultures (with Wolfgang Hallet), and Class Divisions in Serial Television (with Sieglinde Lemke). Her upcoming monograph explores places of homelessness in American culture. She has published on narrative temporality, the political dimensions of heavyweight boxing, film and comic adaptation, and the American Western.Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis is professor of literature in the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Nicosia. She works in the fields of modern English and Anglophone literatures, continental philosophy, and cultural studies. Rossitsa is the author of the book Stories of the Unconscious: Sub-Versions in Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva (2009), as well as the editor of a volume on Ford Madox Ford's novel The Good Soldier and two special issues of the journal Studies in the Literary Imagination on Julia Kristeva and on Iris Murdoch. Currently, Terzieva-Artemis is editing three special issues for the journals Angelaki (2026) and Journal of Narrative Theory (2025 and 2026), working on the political novel in Europe, and the intersections between language, literature, and philosophy in general.Steven Willemsen is assistant professor in arts and cognition at the University of Groningen and an affiliated researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. He is author of Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Films (2017, with Miklós Kiss) and editor of Puzzling Stories: The Aesthetic Appeal of Cognitive Challenge in Film, Television, and Literature (2022).Sean A. Yeager is an independent scholar. They recently earned their PhD in English from the Ohio State University. Before enrolling at Ohio State, Sean was assistant professor of physics at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Sean's research on “time maps” received the Paul Fourtier Prize for best paper by an emerging scholar at the 2019 Digital Humanities Conference; and their articulation of “aesthetic kinship” received honorable mention for the Nadal Prize at the 2022 International Conference on Narrative. Their present article, on kakokairos, received honorable mention for the 2024 Bruns Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.