The Organizers

Biographical Notes

MMag. Alexandra HAUKE studied English and American Studies as well as Hispanic Studies at the University of Vienna and at the University of Maryland at College Park. She is currently the assistant to the vice president of the German Association for American Studies (DGFA) as well as a lecturer and PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Passau, Germany, where her ongoing dissertation project is tentatively titled “Reframing the American Imaginary: The Genre Aesthetics of Native American Detective Fiction.” She was Visiting Research Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley in 2015 and is co-editor of Native American Survivance, Memory, and Futurity: The Gerald Vizenor Continuum (Routledge, 2016). She is also co-editor of a special issue of Vienna Working Papers in Canadian Studies, titled "Building Bridges, Breaking Barriers: Canada in the 21st Century" (forthcoming, 2017) and is currently working on essays on animals in detective fiction and the politics of hipster porn (both forthcoming in 2018). Her research interests include Native American and First Nations’ studies, transnational American studies, Canadian studies, contemporary American TV and film, and American popular culture.

Dr. Judith KOHLENBERGER is affiliated with the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) and the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU). She has a multi‐disciplinary background in American cultural studies, with a focus on science and technology studies and politics of representation. Her recently published monograph The New Formula For Cool: Science, Technology, and the Popular in the American Imagination (transcript 2015) explores legitimation discourses of technoscience in American popular culture. Since fall 2015, she has been working on the Displaced Persons in Austria Survey (DiPAS), which examines the human capital, educational attainment, and values of forced migrants from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan in Austria. In addition, Dr. Kohlenberger coordinates the interdisciplinary MSc program “Socio-Ecological Economics and Policy” (SEEP) at WU and serves on the committee of the Refugee Outreach and Research Network (ror-n) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.


Dr. Katharina WIEDLACK is currently Hertha Firnberg post-doc Research Fellow at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna. She has a diploma in German Literature and Gender Studies and a doctoral degree in English and American Studies from the University of Vienna. She was visiting researcher at UC Berkeley (2011/2012) while finishing her book Queer-Feminist Punk: An Anti-Social History on US-American counter cultures. She was writer in residence at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU (2015/2016) and visiting researcher at the Center for Advanced Media Studies, Johns Hopkins University (Feb-May 2017). She has taught at different universities in Europe and currently teaches American cultural studies, gender, and disability studies at State University St. Petersburg and at the University of Vienna. Her most recent research project is titled “Looking Eastward: US-Identity, Western Values, and Russian Bodies.”