An Eclectic Bestiary Encounters in a More-than-Human World

Birgit Spengler is Professor of American Literature at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. She is the author of two books, Vision, Gender, and Power in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing, 1860-1900 (2008) and Literary Spinoffs: Rewriting the Classics - Re-Imagining the Community (2015). Her research focuses, among other things, on articulations of states of exception, bare life, and precarious being in contemporary American literature and other cultural media.
Babette B. Tischleder is Professor of North American Studies and Media Studies at the University of Göttingen. Her books include The Literary Life of Things: Case Studies in American Fiction (2014) and the coedited volume Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age (2015). Her research focuses, among other things, on the ways that critical and creative practices tackle present ecological troubles and our endangered futures.