ORGANIZERS

Roberta Maierhofer is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Center for Inter-American Studies (C.IAS) at the University of Graz, Austria. From 1999 to 2011, she held a series of Vice-Rector positions for International Relations (1999-2003), International Relations and Affirmative Action for Women (2003-2007), and International Relations and Interdisciplinary Cooperation (2007-2011). In 2000, she initiated and established the focus area South-Eastern Europe at the University of Graz. This expertise of regional and interregional collaboration was fundamental for her leadership role at the Center for Inter-American Studies, which she has been directing since February 2007, and determined how the University of Graz established a second regional focus area in terms of North-, Central- and South America in 2012. She also acts as a co-advisor in terms of the Joint Degree in English and American Studies. Since 2004, she has been directing the Graz International Summer School Seggau, which was established as an interdisciplinary and intercultural platform in the fields of European and Inter-American Studies.

Don E. Walicek is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras Campus. He earned a BA in Cultural Anthropology and an MA in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He was awarded his PhD in English from the University of Puerto Rico. Much of his research has focus on issues of language, migration, and social life in the Caribbean, in particular Anguilla, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. His publications include Guantánamo and American Empire: The Humanities Respond (2018) and an issue of the Caribbean Studies journal Sargasso titled,“Guantánamo: What’s Next?,”both of which he co-edited with Jessica Adams. In 2019, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. He has acted as editor of the journal Sargasso since 2009

Nicole Haring is postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. Her research interests focus on feminist theory, contemporary US-American literature, Inter-American studies, aging and intergenerational studies, and critical pedagogies. She has had a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Oklahoma (2019-2020), the Elisabeth-List-Fellowship for Gender Studies at the University of Graz (2020-2021) and recently finished her DOC Fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Science where she worked on intergenerational storytelling on gender and education (2021-2023). Currently, her research focuses on social reproduction theory, eco-criticism and environmental humanities. She is the lead researcher in the Erasmus+ project “Eco-Storytelling” and has been the academic assistant of the Graz International Summer School Seggau (GUSEGG) since 2022. Additionally, she was the co-organizer of the 2022 Graz camps conference.

Christian Cwik is a historian for Latin American and Caribbean. He graduated from the University of Vienna, where he earned a PhD in history and philosophy with an emphasis on African and Jewish Diaspora, Slave-trade and slavery as well as Shoa-history. Before joining the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz in 2019 he was lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago, invited professor at the University of Havana, the University of Cartagena de Indias in Colombia and professor for Colonial Ibero-American history at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela in Caracas. Furthermore, he was substitute professor at Cologne and Erfurt University in Germany. About interment and repression during the Shoa and aftermath he has published several books and articles among them Las relaciones bilaterales en perspectiva histórica, 1504-2017 (2019) and Diktaturen im Zeitalter des Kalten Krieges (with Hans-Joachim König and Stefan Rinke 2020).

Bilgin Ayata is a professor for Southeastern European Studies at the Center for Southeastern European Studies at the University of Graz. Her research centers on socio-political transformation processes with a focus on migration, borders, affect and emotions. She is project leader of the NOMIS Research project “Elastic Borders- Rethinking the borders of the 21st Century”. She has published widely on affective politics, displacement, diasporas, citizenship, memory and genocide denial and foreign policy. Her SNF Funded research project on “Affective Citizenship: Religion, Migration and Belonging in Europe” examined the relationship between religious incorporation and belonging. Her SNIS funded project “Infrastructure space and the future of Migration Management” explored the infrastructure of migration control. Ayata is co-speaker of the Cluster “Migration, Borders and Mobility” at the Field of Excellence “Dimensions of Europe” at the University of Graz and has been DFG-Mercator Fellow of the SFB 1171 “Affective Societies” at the FU Berlin (2019-2023).

Laura Jung is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Graz. She earned a PhD in International Relations from the University of Sussex and holds an MA in Political Science and a BA in History and Sociology. Her research focuses on the interactions of science, technology and medicine with political orders. She is currently a member of the NOMIS-funded research project “Elastic Borders” at the University of Graz, where she is researching the use of advanced technologies in the EUropean border regime. Her thesis research focused on the trauma diagnosis as a means of nation-building in Germany, and she has published on themes of sovereignty, biopolitics, psychiatric diagnosis, welfare, compensation claims, and eugenic politics. She was recently awarded a grant by the Zukunftsfond Styria to research the impact of AI technologies on asylum processing in Austria.

Esther Whitfield is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. She is author of Cuban Currency: The Dollar and ‘Special Period’ Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2008); co-editor with Jacqueline Loss of New Short Fiction from Cuba (2008); and co-editor with Anke Birkenmaier of a collection of essays on post-1989 Havana, Havana Beyond the Ruins (2011). She has published articles on literary writing in post-Soviet Cuba and borders, visibility and surveillance at the Guantánamo naval base. She is currently writing a book, “The New No-Man’s Land: Guantánamo’s Literary Life,” which proposes reading the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo and the surrounding areas of Eastern Cuba as a borderland region that shares a natural environment, a marking of human lives by isolation, and a body of literature and art privileging survival over political hostility.

Eva Katharina Bauer is currently enrolled in the Joint Master’s Programme for English and American Studies at the University of Graz and the Université Paris Cité. She supports both, the Institute of English Studies and the Center for Inter-American Studies in the capacity of a student assistant. Her academic interests mainly revolve around socio- and psycholinguistics as well as feminist and African American literature. Her current research focuses on the role of temporalities of environmental issues within ecolinguistics. She was part of the local organizing team of the sixth International Conference on Ecolinguistics in Graz and helped as a student assistant at the first Graz/Puerto Rico International Conference on Human Rights from an Inter-American Perspective in 2022. For this year’s conference, Eva will join the organizational committee.

Mirna Cobanovic is currently enrolled in the Bachelor´s Degree in English and American studies at the University of Graz. She is currently employed at the Center for Inter-American Studies as a student assistant, as part of which she was tasked with helping the first CAMPS conference in 2022. As a self-proclaimed “person interested in anything and everything”, she finds no difficulty participating in any discourse, debate or even conversation.

Artiola Kajtazi is a MA student at the University of Graz, specializing in English and American studies. Alongside her academic commitments, Artiola serves as a student assistant at the Center for Inter-American Studies. She previously worked as ESL teacher and executive assistant. Beyond her academic and professional endeavors, she is a passionate human rights activist. Her commitment to this cause has led her to collaborate with various local and international non-governmental organizations operating in Kosovo, focusing on raising awareness and supporting women’s rights, including organizing impactful events to address the issue of rape victims from the 1999 war in Kosovo.

Anamari Slemensek is currently enrolled at the University of Graz, majoring in English and American Studies and minoring in economics, languages and law. Her primary research focus is the analysis of gender roles, power dynamics, and injustices within American literature. She is currently employed as a student assistant at the Center for Inter-American Studies, where she excels in frontend and backend web development, copywriting, editing, and graphic design.