Nele Sawallisch is Assistant Professor for American Literature at Trier University, Germany. Her first book, Fugitive Borders: Black Canadian Cross-Border Literature at Mid-Nineteenth Century was published with transcript in 2018. She has published on Canadian and US-American Literatures, Black literary history, the slave narrative, gendered borders, and print cultures.

Johanna Seibert earned her PhD in American Studies at the Obama Institute at the University of Mainz, Germany. In 2022, she published her book Early African Caribbean Newspapers as Archipelagic Media in the Emancipation Age with Brill. She now works as a strategist with a focus on science diplomacy at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.