Christian Quendler (Principal Investigator)

is Professor of American Studies, Film and Media at the University of Innsbruck. He is the author of three monographs, From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Metafiction, Interfaces of Fiction, and The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema. He received grants and fellowships from the Austrian Academy of Science and the National Humanities Center and was a visiting lecturer and scholar at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Notre Dame University, the University of Alberta, and most recently a Botstiber-Fulbright Visiting Professor of Austrian-American Studies at Appalachian State University.

Eva-Maria Müller (Postdoctoral Researcher)

Her research interests combine mountain film and literature, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism. She contributes research on cinematic cultures of descent to the project as a postdoctoral researcher. Eva submitted her PhD thesis ‘Rewriting Alpine Orientalism’ at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at the University of Gießen, Germany, and holds an MA from the University of Innsbruck, where she studied English and biology. She was a visiting researcher at the University of Alberta and a doctoral candidate at the Mellon-funded IGHERT consortium at the University of California Santa Cruz, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the Australian National University. When she is not researching filmic narration after ascent, she is hiking, biking, and skiing in the Tyrolean Alps, where she also serves as an advisor for two cultural festivals. 

Photo: Robin Peer

Hilde Wolfmeyer

is in charge of the Sonja Bahn Video Archive at the Department of American Studies, University of Innsbruck, where she is currently expanding the number and range of mountain films in the archive's holdings as well as their documentation in the accompanying database. 

Michael Fuchs

Michael Fuchs earned his doctoral degree in English & American studies at the University of Graz, where he also worked for close to a decade. Michael's research centers on horror and science fiction across media and has recently focused on environmental questions and the intersections between literature/popular culture and science. For more on his past and ongoing work, see his website.

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Elaine Erwin Casero

is currently studying English and Spanish in the Master’s teaching program at the University of Innsbruck. In 2022/23, she spent a year in Madrid as a language assistant teaching German as a third language. After her return, she has worked as the coordinator of the Center of Inter-American Studies at the University of Innsbruck. Her academic interests include landscape and film studies. She is currently writing an M.A. thesis on J.A. Bayona La sociedad de la nieve (2023), in which she examines the film from an ecocritical perspective.

Charlotte Bösling

is a research assistant at Philipps University Marburg and is currently doing her PhD in the research training group “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University Frankfurt. She studied Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus Liebig University Giessen and completed the master’s program “Media and Cultural Practice” at Philipps University Marburg. Since 2015 Charlotte Bösling has been working as a freelance photographer, videographer and director with various artists and groups, at Schauspiel Frankfurt, the Women’s Bouldering Festival Fontainebleau, Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, and the memorial sites Augustaschacht and Gestapokeller, among others. Her research interests include body history and body practices, film aesthetics, sports and utility, film and non-theatrical film, theatre, performativity and film.

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Benita Lehmann

studied at the University of Siegen, University College Dublin and the University of Innsbruck, where she is currently writing her dissertation about alpine media networks. Drawing on media ecology and archeology as well as network aesthetics, she examines the density of mountains in film culture. She also worked in the fields of marketing and communication as well as cultural and scientific project management.

Johannes Vith

graduated as Mag. phil. in English, Geography, and Education from the University of Innsbruck in May 2019. From August 2019 until April 2020, he worked as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. In May 2020, he started his PhD in American Studies at the University of Innsbruck. He is writing his dissertation on mountain film in an extraterrestrial setting.

Sean Cubitt

Professor of Film and Television, University of Melbourne, Australia

is Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include The Cinema Effect, EcoMedia, The Practice of Light, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies and Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image. He is a co-editor of The Ecocinema Reader and of Ecomedia: Key Issues. Series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press, his research focuses on the history and philosophy of media, political aesthetics, media art history, ecocriticism, and practices of truth.

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Jennifer Fay

Professor and Department Chair of Cinema & Media Arts at Vanderbilt University and also Professor of English. My research and teaching are broadly concerned with transatlantic film and media theory, environmental criticism, including critical Anthropocene studies, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. These interests are at the center of my book Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (2018, Oxford University Press). Chapters move from Buster Keaton’s weather designs to the Nevada atomic testing range and from China’s Three Gorges Dam to the icy shores of Antarctica. The book explores the relationship of media theory and aesthetics to the production of artificial worlds, weather, and climates in which hospitality and survival in the world are at stake.

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Lisa Gotto

Professor for Film Theory at the University of Vienna

Her major research interests are in film history, film theory, and digital media culture. Recent publications: Hollywood im Zeitalter des Post Cinema. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme (ed. with Sebastian Lederle, 2020), „Modellierungen in Eis und Schnee: Das Material des Bergfilms“, in: Material und künstlerisches Handeln, ed. Sabiene Autsch, Sara Hornäk, Bielefeld 2017, pp. 197-210.

Photo: © Universität Wien/Barbara Mair

Tom Gunning

Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago, USA

is Professor Emeritus in the Department on Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago.  He is the author of D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press, 1986) and The Films of Fritz Lang; Allegories of Vision and Modernity  (British Film Institute, 2000), as well as over hundred and fifty articles on early cinema, film history and theory, avant-garde film, film genre, and cinema and modernism. With Andre Gaudreault he originated the influential theory of the “Cinema of Attractions.” In 2009 he was awarded a Andrew A. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award and in 2010 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently working on a book on the invention of the moving image. His theater piece, created in collaboration with director Travis Preston, Fantomas: The Revenge of the Image premiered in 2017 at the Wuzhen International Theater Festival in Wuzhen China.

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Richard Grusin

Professor of English and Media Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

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Kamaal Haque

Associate Professor of German at Dickinson College, USA

His research focuses on the the Alps in German literature and film. He has published multiple essays on mountain film pioneers Luis Trenker and Arnold Fanck. Other publications have been on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Georg Hamann and Muslim minorities in Germany. He is currently working on a monograph on the career of Luis Trenker.

Sophia Mehrbrey

Postdoctoral Researcher

After completing a bachelor’s degree in European Studies at the University of Passau (2012) and a master’s degree in Lettres Modernes at the University of Rouen, Sophia Mehrbrey received her PhD in French Literature in 2019. Since October 2019, she has been working as a post-doctoral researcher in the Research Training Group “European Dream Cultures” at Saarland University. Her current research interests focus on aesthetic mountain representations in literature and film, transcultural memory discourses in the Alpine regions and transalpine Border Studies.

Jennifer Lynn Peterson

Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Woodbury University L.A., USA

is the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press, 2013). Her academic articles have been published in Feminist Media Histories, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Camera Obscura, The Moving Image, and the Getty Research Journal, and in numerous edited collections. Previously a tenured professor in the Film Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she is now a Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. She is currently working on her second book, Cinema’s Ecological Past: Film History, Nature, and Endangerment Before 1960.

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Ralph Poole

is an American-German researcher who teaches as Professor of American Studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria. Originally a trained literary and musicologist scholar, he has moved into the fields of gender and cultural studies. He taught at the University of Munich, Germany, at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey, and was a research scholar at CUNY’s Center for Advanced Studies in Theater Arts in Manhattan. His book publications include a monograph on eating disorders in the work of Margaret Atwood, a study on performing bodies in the Avant-Garde theater tradition, a book on satirical and autoethnographical “cannibal” texts, a collection of essays on “dangerous masculinities”, and another collection on “queer Turkey”. Having wrapped up a project funded by the Austrian Science Fund on “Gender and Comedy in the Age of the American Revolution”, he is currently researching the Austrian Heimatfilm from a trans-European and genderqueer perspective. His research interests include gender and queer studies, popular culture, and transnational American studies.

Boris Previšić

Professor for Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Lucerne, Switzerland

is director of the Institute "Cultures of the Alps" in Altdorf and SNSF-funded professor of cultural and literary studies at the University of Lucerne. His research focuses on questions of perception and proposed solutions in dealing with the hyperobject climate, interactions between narrative and historiography, issues of interculturalism and transmediality, especially between literature and music. Selection of recent monographs in German: CO2: Five past twelve. How we can prevent climate collapse. Mandelbaum: Wien 2020 / together with Silvan Moosmüller (ed.): Polyphony and Narration (= Research on Alternative Varieties of Explorations in Narrative). Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag 2020 / Gotthard Fantasies – An Anthology from Science and Literature. Baden: Hier und jetzt 2016.

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Maria San Filippo

Associate Professor of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College (Boston), USA

Maria San Filippo is Associate Professor of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College (Boston) and Editor-in-Chief of New Review of Film and Television Studies. She authored the Lambda Literary Award-winning The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television (2013), ‘Provocauteurs’ and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media (2021), and edited the collection After ‘Happily Ever After’: Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age (Wayne State University Press, 2021). Her Queer Film Classics volume on Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior (2014) will be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in November 2022. She was a 2021-22 U.S. Fulbright Scholar in the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, where she taught and conducted research on her next book project (tentatively titled) Bad Feminists: Millennial Women Media Creators and Subversive Sexual Politics.

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Caroline Schaumann

Professor of German Studies at Emory University, USA

Caroline Schaumann is Professor of German Studies and affiliated faculty with Film Studies and the Sustainability Minor at Emory University. Her teaching and research interests include ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, cultural histories of exploration and mountaineering, and the Anthropocene. She co-edited the anthologies Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (2012) and Mountains and the German Mind (2020) with Sean Ireton, and German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene with Heather Sullivan (2017). Recently, she published Peak Pursuits: The Emergence of Mountaineering in the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press, 2020), a monograph on the cultural history of mountaineering that sheds light on culturally constructed notions of wilderness, masculinity, and national identity.

Stephen Slemon

Professor Emeritus for English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Canada

studies the ways in which mountaineering has been represented in literature, in film and image, and in national histories, the goal being to imagine an inclusive, equitable, and genuinely postcolonial future for the practice. His essays on postcolonialism and its discontents have appeared in the usual discipline-specific journals, and in collections such as Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology (Blackwell), The Post-colonial Studies Reader (Routledge), Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (Routledge), Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (E. Arnold), The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, and A Postmodern Reader (SUNY). With Zac Robinson, professor at the University of Alberta, Vice-President for Mountain Culture with the Alpine Club of Canada, he writes on early Canadian mountaineering. Their articles have appeared in venues such as the Canadian Alpine Journal, the Rocky Mountains Annual, and Alpinist. Their book on early Canadian mountaineering is scheduled to appear in 2021.

  Stephen Slemon

Zac Robinson

Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta

He is a historian and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta. A writer and teacher of mountain history and literature, Robinson is the co-lead of the award-winning Mountains 101 Massive Open Online Course launched in 2017. He presently serves as the Vice President for Mountain Culture of The Alpine Club of Canada, is a co-editor of the ACC's State of the Mountains Report, and a regular contributor to the Canadian Alpine Journal. These days, Robinson divides his time between organizing, with Alison Criscitiello, a scientific expedition to Mount Logan for the spring of 2021 to investigate climate and landscape change on Canada's highest peak (www.loganice.ca), and completing a book project, with Stephen Slemon, on the history of early climbing in the Canadian Rockies. In 2018, Robinson was elected to the Royal Canadian Geographical Society's College of Fellows. He presently lives in Edmonton.

Alexa Weik von Mossner

is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt. Her research explores the theoretical and empirical intersections of cognitive psychology, affective narratology, and environmental literature and film. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Minds: Literature, Emotion, and the Transnational Imagination (U of Texas P, 2014) and Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2017), the editor of Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014), and co-editor of The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (with Sylvia Mayer, Winter 2014).

Daniel Winkler

Professor at the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Heidelberg

Since 2020, Daniel Winkler has been Professor at the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Heidelberg, where he teaches Italian, French and Francophone Literature and Cinema. He was Lecturer at the Universities of Innsbruck and Vienna and Research Fellow in Marseilles, Paris, Halle and Dresden. Daniel wrote his PhD thesis on Marseille as a cinematic city (Marseille! Eine Metropole im filmischen Blick, Schüren 2013, 2nd edition) and his postdoctoral project on Italian tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment (Vittorio Alfieri und das republikanische Tragödienprojekt, Fink 2016). His current research interests lie in the fields of Political Aesthetics and Enlightenment, Literature and Film; Urban and Alpine Imaginaries; Mediterranean Studies.