Jakub Kazecki (Bates College) teaches German language, literature and film. He is the author of Laughter in the Trenches: Humour and Front Experience in German First World War Narratives (2012). His articles on the 20-century German literature and images of Polish-German relationships in literature, film and visual arts appeared in journals and edited volumes in the fields of German and Slavic Studies. His recent publications include the essay on images of the German-Polish borderlands in German cinema in the volume Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria (2012), and the article on the functions of humor and laughter in the German literature of the First World War in the collection Expressions of the Unspeakable: Narratives of Trauma (2013). Kazecki is currently working on a book on images of the East in the contemporary German cinema.
Karen A. Ritzenhoff (Central Connecticut State University) is a professor of Communication and a member of the Program for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She teaches courses on women and film, mass media, film history, global visual communication, American cinema, and television production. Her dissertation focused on borderlands: she analyzed the work of East German documentary filmmakers, many affiliated with the DEFA studios, and how they depicted the time period before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She is the co-editor of Screening the Dark Side of Love: From Euro-Horror to American Cinema (with Karen Randell, 2012). She has also co-edited Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist World (with Katherine A. Hermes, 2009), and authored the monograph Screen Nightmares: Video, Television, and Violence in Film (2010). Ritzenhoff is currently working on Stanley Kubrick as well as representations of the Apocalypse in Cinema.
Cynthia J. Miller (Emerson College) is a cultural anthropologist, specializing in popular culture and visual media. Her writing and photography has appeared in edited volumes and journals across the disciplines. She is the editor of Too Bold for the Box Office: The Mockumentary From Big Screen to Small (2012), and co-editor of: 1950s ‘Rocketman’ TV Series and Their Fans: Cadets, Rangers, and Junior Space Men (with A. Bowdoin Van Riper, 2012); Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier (with A. Bowdoin Van Riper, 2012); and the award-winning Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (with Julie Anne Taddeo, 2012). She serves as series editor for Scarecrow Press’s Film and History series, as well as on the editorial board of the Journal of Popular Television. Miller is currently at work on two edited volumes: Undead in the West II: They Just Keep Coming, and (Re)Locating the Frontier: International Western Films.