Judith Laister is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Graz. She holds degrees in European Ethnology, Art History, and Art Education. In addition to teaching and researching at the university, she collaborates with secondary schools and art-related educational contexts, and she is actively involved in projects and associations focused on the politics of arts and culture. Her research areas include urban anthropology, aesthetic and visual anthropology, relations between art and scholarship, art in the public realm, particiaptory and relational art, critique of representation, and anthropology in the Anthropocene.

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Margit Peterfy teaches U.S. literature and culture at the Department of English at Heidelberg University and at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. At the same time, she is Principal Investigator and supervisor of doctoral theses in the Research Training Group "Authority and Trust in American Culture, Society, History, and Politics," which is funded by the German Research Foundation. Her specialization within the college is on "The Urban Dimension of Authority and Trust." In this context, she is currently working on a monograph on the representation of "trust" in U.S. urban literature. Her other research interests, primarily historically oriented, range from American poetry to performative and intermedial aspects in literature.

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personal homepage: as.uni-heidelberg.de/personen/Peterfy
Heidelberger Graduiertenkolleg: hca.uni-heidelberg.de/gkat/index.html

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Christina Töpfer is an editor, author and cultural worker with a background in American Studies, Communication and Media Studies and Visual Studies. Since 2018, she has been editor-in-chief of the magazine Camera Austria International, for which she worked as an editor from 2013. Until 2017, she also worked for the Graz Museum, where she was responsible for the museum's publishing activities and co-curated various exhibitions on contemporary urban themes. She is a co-founder of Street Cinema Graz, which has been regularly realising short film walks in public spaces since 2013, sometimes in cooperation with other cultural institutions.

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Klaus Rieser is ao. Univ.-Prof. for American Studies at the University of Graz, where he researches and teaches in the field of cultural studies and visual cultures. He directed the Institute for American Studies from 2007 to 2013 and from 2016 to 2017. His research areas include U.S. film, representations of family, social gender (masculinity) and ethnicity, and visual cultural studies. His books have focused on migration in film, experimental films, and masculinity in film. Several articles and co-edited books address iconic figures and cultural contact spaces, among other topics. He is co-editor of the book series "American Studies in Austria" and the open access journal JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, which began publication in 2019.

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Presentation:
Annette Kisling lives in Berlin and Leipzig. She studied at the art academies in Kassel, Offenbach and Hamburg. This was followed by longer working stays in Zurich, Rotterdam, Paris, Marfa, Venice, Bangalore, Ahmedabad. Since 2009 Annette Kisling is professor for photography at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. In photographic series Annette Kisling describes her experiences with the architecture that surrounds her. One focus is the modernism of the 20th century. In the case of the series Robin Hood Gardens, she deals with the demolition of the eponymous social housing complex of the 1970s and the unmistakable structural redefinition of the site in the 2020s.

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Panel chair:
Nassim Balestrini is Professor of American Studies and Intermediality and heads both the Institute for American Studies and the Center for Intermediality at the University of Graz. Her research interests are in American literature and culture from the 18th century to the present. She enjoys working on topics that involve cross-border and comparative issues and deal with different media, genres, cultures, and languages. Her research in recent years has been informed by her engagement with dramatic works on climate change, contemporary poetry by non-white and bi-cultural writers, hip hop lyricists of indigenous descent, and intermediality as a theoretical and methodological approach. The dialogue between artists and scholars is especially close to her heart.