Notes on Contributors

Ron Ben-Tovim is a senior lecturer in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he focuses on the convergence of war writing, disability studies, and trauma studies. His first book, Poetic Prosthetics: Trauma and Language in Contemporary Veterans’ Writing, was published in 2022.Claudia Carroll is assistant professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research uses quantitative methods to study characterization in fiction, with a focus on the nineteenth-century novel. A founding principal investigator at CMU's AI Humanities Lab, she is developing machine-learning methods for the analysis of reader cognition, as well as computational methods for the formal analysis of AI-generated literature. Her research is published or forthcoming in the Journal of Victorian Culture, the Harvard Data Science Review, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, the Journal of Cultural Analytics, Narrative Inquiry, and the Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature. For her work on narrative structure, she is the recipient of the 2022 Alan Nadal Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative.Margaret H. Freeman is professor emerita of Los Angeles Valley College, codirector of Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts, and coeditor of the Cognition and Poetics series at Oxford University Press (2016–2023) and the current Cognition, Poetics, and the Arts series at Bloomsbury Academic. A founder of the Emily Dickinson International Society, she served as its first president from 1988 to 1992. She has published widely in the fields of poetic and aesthetic cognition. Her most recent publications are The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition (2020) and Emily Dickinson's Poetic Art: A Cognitive Reading (2023).Edmund J. Goehring is professor of music history at the University of Western Ontario. His latest book is titled Mozart, Genius, and the Possibilities of Art (2024), and he has also written on Martin McDonagh's In Bruges for Film International, Verdi's Otello for Studi Verdiani, and on the Don Juan legend for Publications of the Modern Language Association.Michael Huffmaster is professor of German at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. His current book project, “Reading Kafka's Mind,” employs cognitive theory to explain the Kafkaesque. In literary linguistics, his work focuses on speech act theory and metaphor theory. In education, his research investigates literary translation in the foreign language classroom and examines how adult foreign language and literature study fosters creative and critical thinking.George Kovalenko is a visiting scholar at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University and an affiliate scholar of the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. His articles have been published in the Wallace Stevens Journal and New German Critique.Elise Kraatila is a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, and she is currently the principal investigator of a project on future narratives and public security discourse in Finnish journalism. Her previous research has focused on the epistemic and rhetorical qualities of speculative storytelling in both fiction and nonfiction. She has recently published articles on master and counter-narratives in climate fiction and the epistemics of future-oriented journalism, as well as her first monograph, Speculative Mimesis in Fantasy Literature (2025), on speculation as an artistic response to uncertain reality.Winfried Menninghaus has served as a professor of German and Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin, Yale University, and other universities. From 2013 through 2022, he was a founding director of the Max Planck-Institute of Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main/ Germany.Héctor Muiños Olivas is the Fellow Writer in Residence at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) — Institute for Advanced Study. He previously lectured at Dublin City University and Boston University. His research explores creative writing and literary character from a cognitive narratology perspective, with a particular focus on the phenomenon of narrative absorption.Marcela Sulak directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University, where she researches American immigrant poetries, hybrid literatures, and translation. Her five translations from the Hebrew, Czech, and French have been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN. She has published five collections of poetry, including City of Skypapers, a finalist for the Jewish National Book Awards in Poetry.Sebastian Wallot is professor of psychology at Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany), where he has been chair of psychology and research methods since 2020. His research focuses on applied statistics and language comprehension, with a particular interest in reading processes such as eye movements and response dynamics. His work examines how measures of reading behavior can be linked to reading comprehension and addresses the nature of meaning in language from a psychological perspective and its implications for scientific methodology and theory building. His publications have appeared in journals such as Cognition, the Journals of Experimental Psychology, and Discourse Processes. Before joining Leuphana University, he was a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt and a postdoctoral fellow at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University.