Networks

EAAS Digital Studies Network

The mission of the EAAS Digital Studies Network is to facilitate the communication and collaboration between scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in Europe with an interest in issues pertaining to the broader production and theorization of digital literary forms, digitality and popular culture, experimentation with print and digital writing and typographic practices, locative media and narrative as well as digital humanities within the context of American Studies. This Network will seek to connect with institutions, organizations, and postgraduate programs in Europe that specialize in this area of research so as to foster the channeling of information, effective contact between its members, and representation in EAAS biannual conferences and other fora as well as symposia with the aim of promoting digital studies research in Europe.

Steering Committee:

Tatiani Rapatzikou (Greece); Frank Mehring (The Netherlands); Stefan Brandt (Austria); Marc Priewe (Germany); Manuel Portela (Portugal); María Mencía (U.K.)

Tatiani G. Rapatzikou is Associate Professor in the Department of American Literature, School of English at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She is currently the President of HELAAS and the EAAS Sec.-General. Her publications (monograph, articles, edited volumes) focus on contemporary American literature (fiction and poetry), technological uncanny, cyberpunk/cyberculture (with emphasis on William Gibson) as well as on the convergence of digital and print narratives. In 2009, she was awarded a Fulbright Visiting Scholar grant for her research in contemporary American fiction and digital media (M.I.T. Comparative Media Studies program). In 2012, she was a visiting research scholar at the Literature Program (Duke University), and winner of the Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund international competition for her project ‘Urban Environments in Transition’ (www.asrp.gr/urban). She has co-edited with Philip Leonard at Nottingham Trent University, UK, a special issue for Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism with the title "Digital Literary Production and the Humanities" (http://ejournals.lib.auth.gr/gramma). In 2016 she was a visiting research scholar at York University, Toronto, Canada, for her research in urban narratives and digital literary practice. She also collaborated in the same year with Demetres Tryphonopoulos, Brandon University, Canada, in a research project – funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), the Institute of International Education (IIE) in collaboration with the Fulbright Foundation in Greece – on Anglo-American Modernist Poetry, the Classics, and Digitized Archived Materials.

Email: trapatz@enl.auth.gr

Frank Mehring is Professor and Chair of American studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. In 2012, he received the Rob Kroes Award for his monograph THE DEMOCRATIC GAP (2014). In addition to the analysis of German-American encounters and transcultural confrontations in biographies, editions and book chapters on Charles Follen, Kurt Weill, Hannah Arendt and Winold Reiss, he is particularly interested in the transnational appeal, processes of circulation and intermedial dimension of music. His publications include SIGHT & SOUND (2001) on transatlantic romantic movements, SPHERE MELODIES (2003) about the transcendentalist roots of the composers Charles Ives and John Cage, THE SOUNDTRACK OF LIBERATION (2015) and most recently SOUND & VISION: INTERMEDIAL APPROACHES TO AMERICAN MUSIC, a guest edited special edition for the European Journal of American Studies, co-edited with Erik Redling. He co-organized the NASA conference on Digital Humanities (2016) and is currently working on a project dedicated to semi-automatic clustering of political photographs. He co-curated exhibitions on Winold Reiss, the Marshall Plan, and Liberation Songs in New York, Nijmegen and The Hague.

Email: f.mehring@let.ru.nl

Stefan L. Brandt is Professor of American Studies at the University of Graz and former President of the Austrian Association for American Studies. After receiving his PhD and Venia Legendi at Freie Universität Berlin, he became affiliated with various international universities, among others Freie Universität Berlin, University of Vienna, Università Ca‘ Foscari, Radboud Universiteit, University of Toronto, and Harvard University. Brandt has talked and published on a wide range of topics within the interdisciplinary fields of American Popular Culture, Gender & Urban Theory as well as Transnational Studies. He has published three monographs – Male Gazes (1999), Staged Masculinity (2007), The Culture of Corporeality (2007) – and (co-)edited six anthologies – Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1999), Transnational American Studies (w/ Winfried Fluck and Ingrid Thaler) (2007), Making National Bodies (w/ Astrid M. Fellner) (2010), and Transcultural Spaces (w/ Winfried Fluck & Frank Mehring) (2010), In-Between: Liminal Spaces in Canadian Literature and Culture (Lang Canadiana Series), and Space Oddities (LIT Verlag, w/ Michael Fuchs). Three anthologies are forthcoming: Fantastic Cities (U of Mississippi Press, w/ Michael Fuchs and Stefan Rabitsch), Animals in American Television (Special Issue of the European Journal of American Studies, w/ Michael Fuchs), and Ecomasculinities: Negotiating New Forms of Male Gender Identity in North America (Lexington Books, w/ Rubén Cenamor).

Email: stefan.brandt@uni-graz.at

Marc Priewe is Full Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He previously worked at the University of Potsdam, St. Lawrence University, the New School, and the University of Duisburg-Essen. His books include Writing Transit: Refiguring National Imaginaries in Chicana/o Narratives (2007), Imagined Transnationalism: U.S-Latino/a Literature, Culture, and Identity (2009), and Textualizing Illness: Medicine and Culture in New England, 1620-1730 (2014). His current research interests lie in Transnational American Studies, Digital Humanities, Media Studies, and Popular Music Studies. 

Email: marc.priewe@ilw.uni-stuttgart.de

Manuel Portela is Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Coimbra, where he directs the FCT PhD Programme in Materialities of Literature. He is the author of Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines (MIT Press, 2013), the general editor of LdoD Archive: Collaborative Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet https://ldod.uc.pt/ (CLP, 2017), and one of the contributors to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (2017). He has published widely on digital literature and digital media, including articles in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and electronic book review. He is cofounder and current general editor of the journal MATLIT: Materialities of Literature.

Email: mportela@fl.uc.pt

María Mencía is an artist-researcher in Media Arts and Digital Poetics and Course Leader of the BA in Media and Communication at Kingston University, UK. She is one of the executive members of the Electronic Literature Organization Board of Directors (ELO) and book editor for the "Electronic Literature" series with ELO- Bloomsbury Press.

Her practice-based research explores the poetic space in hybrid textualities of language, art and digital technologies. It has been exhibited worldwide and it is published in the ELCV1 and the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature. Her publication #WomenTechLit was awarded second prize for the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature in 2017; Gateway to the World was selected as example of good practice in digital literature by KVB boekwerk and the Dutch Foundation for Literature (2017); and her interactive work The Winnipeg: The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic was awarded The Robert Coover Award (2018).

She has been the recipient of various research grants and fellowships such as AHRC  (2018-2021); School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark (2017); Laboratory: COSTECH, University of Technology of Compiegne, France (2012); The University of Sydney, Australia (TIES Grant 2007) Media Research Lab -New York University, NY, USA (Promising Researcher Fellowship by Kingston University, 2006); and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Melbourne, Australia (AHRC Small Grants 2005).

URL:www.mariamencia.com
Email: mariamencia2@gmail.com