Our Members

Organizers

Anna-Lena Eick

is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of General and Comparative Literature at the Gutenberg Institute for World Literature and Written Media at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. She is also a Visiting Scholar at CRC 1671 at the University of Heidelberg and an Associated Researcher at CLIC/VUB in Brussels. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies from Justus Liebig University Giessen. Her doctoral thesis Geschichte zerfällt in Bilder, nicht in Geschichten: Visualität in der literarischen Geschichtsdarstellung (Brill, 2024) explores the co-evolution of visual media, such as photography and early film, and the critical re-orientation of postmodern historical novels from the 1960s onwards. Her research interests include narratology, inter- and transmediality studies, cultural studies as well as ancient mythology. Her current research project is directly situated within the discursive field of the postdigital mediascape and examines the forms and affordances of postdigital poetics in contemporary print literature. Methodologically, the project engages with intermedial theory and narratology, adapting both frameworks to account for the dynamics of the postdigital mediascape.

Astrid Ensslin

is Professor for the Dynamics of Virtual Communication Spaces at the University of Regensburg, where she leads the Digital Area Studies Lab (DAS|LAB), which she founded in 2023. Previously held full professorships at the University of Wales (Bangor), the University of Alberta (Canada) and the University of Bergen (Norway). She has published 12 books and over 80 peer-reviewed articles on digital fiction and literary computer games, body image, femtech and digital media, critical community co-design and narrative therapy, discourses of gaming, the spatial design and narrative potential of virtual realities, as well as in methods of digital humanities and empirical reader research. She has been a Director of the Electronic Literature Organization since 2018 and, since 2019, Principal Editor of the Bloomsbury “Electronic Literature” book series. Her latest projects include the de Gruyter Handbook of Language and Digital Culture (co-edited with Carmen Lee); an edited collection on Videogames as Folkworlds (with Dom Ford and Laura Niebling, forthcoming with Play Story Press), and a DFG/AHRC-funded digital folklore project titled “Project StoryMachine” (2025-28). Her research on postdigital reading strategies in immersive VR fiction (with Alice Bell) was published in Anglica 33(2), 2024.

Inge van de Ven

is Associate Professor of Culture Studies at the School of Humanities and Digital Sciences, Tilburg University. She was Marie Curie Global Fellow at UC Santa Barbara and Junior Core Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Budapest. She wrote Big Books in Times of Big Data (Leiden UP, 2019) and, with Lucie Chateau, Digital Culture and the Hermeneutic Tradition: Suspicion, Trust, and Dialogue (Routledge, 2024). Articles appeared in journals such as European Journal of English Studies, Medical Humanities, Narrative, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Celebrity Studies, Games & Culture, Language & Literature, and Journal for Creative Behavior. Within the field of the postdigital, her work examines intersections between literature and new media, focusing on the destabilization of categories such as author, narrator, and reader, as well as the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction.

Members

Maria Bäcke

is Programme Director for the master’s programme LeaDS (Learning, Digitalization, and Sustainability) and leader of the research environment CCD (Communication, Culture, and Diversity) at Jönköping University. She has a PhD in TechnoScience, works as Associate Professor of Education towards Applied IT and as Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature. She is also the Co-Coordinator of the EARLI SIG 21 “Diversity in Education.” Bäcke’s current research merges the fields of literature, digitalisation and AI, education, and cultural studies. In various constellations, Bäcke is currently studying the reasons for, and processes behind, the selection of EdTech and the implementation of AI for students, for instance drawing on power and subversion in “Big Data,” i.e. data ownership and data mining/harvesting.

Alice Bell

is Professor of English language and literature at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research specialisms are cognitive stylistics (including empirical approaches), narratology, and digital fiction (e.g. hypertext fiction, narrative videogames, app-fiction, augmented reality fiction, Virtual Reality fiction, and narratives produced in AI). She has published within the areas of possible worlds theory, unnatural narratology, metalepsis, second-person narrative, fictionality, post-postmodern narrative, and postdigital fiction. Her books include: Reading Digital Fiction: Narrative, Cognition, Mediality (with Astrid Ensslin, Routledge 2024), Unnatural Narratives and Digital Fiction (with Ensslin, OSUP 2021), The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction (Palgrave, 2010), Style and Response (Benjamins 2021, co-edited with Browse et al), and Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology (2019, UoNP, co-edited with Marie-Laure Ryan). She is PI (with Jan Alber, Giessen) for the AHRC/DFG-funded project “Reading Post-Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital: Narrative, Technology, and Cognition in the Twenty-First Century” (2023-2026).

Dorothee Birke

is Professor of Anglophone Literatures at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She was associate professor of English literature at NTNU in Trondheim, junior fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) and Marie Curie COFUND fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS). Her research interests include narrative and reading in the digital age, in particular reading practices on social media. Among her publications in this field are articles on paratext and digitized narrative (Narrative, 2013), “social reading” on social media (Poetics Today, 2021), BookTube (Routledge Companion to Literary Media, 2023) and a diachronic exploration of the phenomenon of crying readers on social media (Language and Literature, 2025). Currently (2026) she is president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN).

Siebe Bluijs

is assistant professor of literature (education) and digitization at the School of Humanities and Digital Sciences of Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He holds a PhD from the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University, and he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University. Bluijs extensively writes on contemporary (Dutch) literature and is particularly interested in digital literature, the relationship between literature and media, experimental literature, and narratology. His current research explores how narratology and poetry analysis can be employed to critically examine technologies such as (generative) AI and Virtual Reality applications.

Carolin Führer

studied German language and literature, Romance languages and literature, history and education in Dresden (Germany), Rome, Siena and Bologna (Italy). She was a secondary school teacher and lecturer at different universities. Now she is chair holder at Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen and represents German Studies with a focus on literature and media education. In 2025, she received a research award for her work on the construction of literary knowledge and co-constructive learning with AI.

Alexandre Gefen

CNRS Research Director within the Unit of Theory and History of Arts and Literature of Modernity (UMR7172, THALIM, CNRS / Sorbonne Nouvelle University - Paris 3), is a historian of ideas and literature. He is the author of numerous books and articles focusing notably on culture, contemporary literature, and literary theory. Founder of Fabula.org, he was one of the pioneers of Digital Humanities in France. Working on the adoption of Artificial Intelligence tools for research in the humanities and social sciences as well as their critical examination, he has led several research programs dedicated to AI in art and literature and has curated two exhibitions on AI.

Theresa Krampe

is a postdoctoral researcher in media studies at the University of Tübingen and the University of Osnabrück, with research foci spanning game studies, transmedial narratology, media ethics, critical AI studies, and gender and queer studies. Her recent publications include the monograph Metareference in Videogames (Routledge 2025) and the edited collection Videogames and Metareference: Mapping the Margins of an Interdisciplinary Field (with Jan-Noël Thon, Routledge 2025) as well as several articles and chapters on retro indie games, queer comics, or fair AI. Within the discursive field of the postdigital, she is particularly interested in how “new” digital media such as indie metagames or analogue horror remediate “older” non-digital media, exploring entanglements between aesthetics, materiality, and affect.

Ylva Lindberg

is a Professor of Education specializing in language and literature at Jönköping University, Sweden. Her research explores how literary practices, values, and modes of circulation change in relation to broader cultural and technological shifts, including globalization, mediatization, and, more recently, generative AI. She currently collaborates with computer scientists, schools, authors, and the publishing house Bonnier in projects aiming at developing responsible and meaningful AI practices in contemporary literary production and education. Lindberg co-edited Framing Futures in Postdigital Education (2024), leads the graduate research school Culturally Empowering Education through Language and Literature (CuEEd-LL), and is part of the Graduate School for AI in Teacher Education (GRAITE). She is also co-leading a project on national literary canons and is a member of the Nordic Research Network on Literature Education.

Bartosz Lutostański

is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. His research focuses on digital fiction, postdigital publishing, critical AI studies, and contemporary social media cultures. He is the author of multiple peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, including publications in The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality (2023) and de Gruyter/Brill’s New Approaches to Transcodification (2025). He is currently co-editor of Postdigital Fiction: Theory, Method, Analysis with Alice Bell (Routledge, 2026). He serves as Deputy Editor of Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies and as a member of the Editorial Board of Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies. He also organises and hosts the academic lecture and discussion series New Media in Contemporary Culture at the University of Warsaw. His work examines app-based narratives, AI-generated literature, influencer cultures, meme circulation, and transmedial storytelling practices. Within the field of postdigital media studies, his research explores intersections between literature, software infrastructures, and platform economies, with particular attention to narrative experimentation, interface aesthetics, participatory cultures, and the cultural implications of algorithmic mediation.

Ruben Vanden Berghe

is a visiting Professor at University of Cologne and a postdoctoral researcher at Tilburg University. At Ghent University, he defended his FWO-funded PhD research project Widening the Net: The Sublime Imagination of the Internet in the Flemish and Dutch Novel, which focused on the postdigital sublime and representations of the internet in Flemish and Dutch fiction. He published articles on the literary imagination of the early internet in the 1990s and information overload in Dutch fiction, as well as on Dutch-language experimental literature, contemporary poetry, and electronic literature.

Eva Wiegmann

is Professor of Intercultural German Studies at the Faculty of Translation, Linguistics, and Cultural Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She is also president of the Carl Einstein Society. As a literary and cultural scholar, she is particularly interested in the cultural effects of the post-digital age and its narrative, as well as global technological interconnectivity and their interactions with literature, writing, and language aesthetics. Together with Anna-Lena Eick and Irina Rajewsky, she organized the workshop After Digitization: An Inventory from a Transcultural Perspective in November 2024 and (together with Anna-Lena Eick) the panel Interferences. Post-Digital Culture(s) and World Literature at the DGAVL conference World Literature in Media Change (September 2026) in Mainz.