Contributors
Flavia Arzeni is Professor Emeritus of Modern German Literature and Culture at Sapienza University of Rome. Her major publications include An Education in Happiness: The Lessons of Hesse and Tagore (Pushkin Press, 2013), Berlino: Un viaggio letterario (Berlin, A Literary Journey; Sellerio, 1997), and L’immagine il Segno (Images and Symbols: Japonism in European Culture between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century; Il Mulino, 1987).
Ingo Cornils is Professor of German Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Writing the Revolution: The Construction of “1968” in German (2016), and Beyond Tomorrow: German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries (2020). He has edited or co-edited the volumes Hermann Hesse Today/Hermann Hesse Heute (with Osman Durrani, 2005), (Un-)erfüllte Wirklichkeit: Neue Studien zu Uwe Timms Werk (with Frank Finlay, 2006), Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism (with Gerrit-Jan Berendse, 2008), A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse (2009), Memories of 1968: International Perspectives (with Sarah Waters, 2010), Alternative Worlds: Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900 (with Ricarda Vidal, 2014), and New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction (with Lars Schmeink, 2022). He has served as executive editor of literatur für leser:innen, for which he has edited special issues on German Science Fiction, the literary representation of German Colonialism (with Sabine Wilke), Hermann Hesse, and Gerhard Henschel.
Neale Cunningham is Specially Appointed Professor in the Liberal Arts Research and Education Center for English at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan. He is the author of Hermann Hesse and Japan: A Study in Reciprocal Transcultural Reception, published by Peter Lang in the Transcultural Cultures series (vol. 4, 2021). His recent publications include “Westöstliche Affinitäten: Hermann Hesse im Bann seines ‘Japanischen Vetters,’” in Berichte: Hermann Hesse Freundkreis/Forschungsgruppe Japan 22 (ed. Y. Yamoto, 2017), “Hermann Hesse and the Butterflies—A Journey from Innocence to Experience and Back,” in Literatur für Leser Themenheft: Forever Young? Unschuld und Erfahrung im Werk Hermann Hesses (ed. I. Cornils, 2016), and “Stimulating Higher Order Thinking: The Dramatization of Graded Readers,” Lingua: Special Issue on CLIL (Sophia University, 2015).
Thomas Cyron is Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Jönköping International Business School. His research focuses on the intersections between entrepreneurship, organization, and communication studies and has been published in the journals Small Business Economics, Long Range Planning, and Management Revue. He currently serves on the editorial review board of European Management Review.
Helga Esselborn-Krumbiegel is in charge of the Cologne Writing Center. After her PhD in German Literature, she published several books in the field of writing didactics, most recently the volume Die Doktorarbeit: 180 Seiten Rückenwind (UTB, 2024). She has also edited three academic writing guides which have become standard works with UTB Publishing House. In addition to her lectures at the Hesse events in Calw, Gaienhofen, Montagnola, Sils Maria, Osaka, and Mumbai, she has authored several independent publications on Hesse (with Reclam and with Cornelsen), and a number of her essays have appeared in anthologies (e.g., Solbach, 2004; Haberland/Horváth; 2013; Battiston/Goldblum, 2021) and in the Hermann-Hesse-Jahrbuch. Esselborn-Krumbiegel is also the editor of the anthology Inspiration Hermann Hesse: Eine Hommage in Geschichten (Inspiration Hermann Hesse: A Homage in Stories; Suhrkamp, 2022).
Carina Ulrika Gröner is Executive Director of the HSG Writing Lab, the Academic Writing Centre, and Lecturer and Assistant at the Department of German Language and Literature at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. She has edited a collection of previously unpublished letters between Hermann Hesse and three citizens of St. Gallen in Ja, das Nehmen und das Geben (Toggenburger Verlag, 2012). In her book Textgewebe (Aisthesis, 2019) she analyzed Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels using Gérard Genette’s model of narrative analysis.
Karl-Josef Kuschel was Professor for Theology of Culture and Interreligious Dialogue, Faculty of Catholic Theology, University of Tübingen (1995–2013) and Co-director of Institute for Ecumenical and Interreligious Research. He has been the President of the Internationale Hermann Hesse Gesellschaft since 2015. His recent publications include Goethe und der Koran (Patmos, 2021); Im Fluss der Dinge: Hermann Hesse und Bertolt Brecht im Dialog mit Buddha, Laotse und Zen (Patmos, 2018) and Die Bibel im Koran: Grundlagen für das interreligiöse Gespräch (Patmos, 2017).
Thomas Taro Lennerfors is Professor and Head of the Division of Industrial Engineering and Management at Uppsala University. His research concerns the intersection between ethics, philosophy, technology, and business. He has published a range of monographs, edited volumes, and journal articles, for example, the book Ethics in Engineering (Studentlitteratur, 2019), and the edited volumes (with Kiyoshi Murata) Tetsugaku Companion to Japanese Ethics and Technology (Springer, 2019) and Ethics and Sustainability in Digital Cultures (Routledge, 2023).
Volker Michels is editor of the collected works of Hermann Hesse. In 1969, Siegfried Unseld, the publisher of Suhrkamp and Insel Verlag in Frankfurt am Main, hired him as an editor for German literature. By 2008, Michels had published more than a hundred volumes, including the posthumous writings and letters of Hermann Hesse, with his own byline as editor. Most notably, he published thousands of Hesse’s culturally critical and political essays that had only appeared in newspapers and magazines. In 2007, Michels completed the first complete edition of Hesse’s works (Sämtliche Werke, twenty-one volumes, comprising ca. fifteen thousand pages). He is currently completing a ten-volume edition of Hesse’s correspondence (Die Briefe). He manages the poet’s artistic estate, which consists of more than three thousand watercolors.
Christopher Newton is a translator and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. He teaches translation at Monash University and the University of Melbourne, where he completed his PhD thesis on English translations of Hesse’s Siddhartha. His main interest is in translation history through the lens of authenticity. His poetry, translations, and articles have appeared in publications ranging from literary journals and translation journals to cookbooks.
Shrikant Arun Pathak is Assistant Professor and a Doctoral Research Guide at the Dept. of German, University of Mumbai. He teaches German language, contemporary German literature, and technical and literary translation. He completed his PhD at the Universität Vechta in Germany in the field of metafiction, hyperreality, and stylistic imitation in contemporary German literature. He has been actively involved in research under the GIP framework (Multilingualism: Concepts and Contexts) in collaboration with the universities of Göttingen, Mumbai and Pune in the areas of translation of literary texts and translation and subtitling of films. He was honored by the National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi for his translation of Sarladevi Mazumdar’s Gandhi Chitrkatha from English into German. He has translated Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Ruhm into Marathi.
John Pizer is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University. He was Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures from 2011 to 2019. He is the author of six books and some eighty articles and book chapters. His area of specialty is eighteenth- to twenty-first-century German literature and thought, with occasional forays into the Baroque and Comparative Literature. His most recent book, Ambivalent Literary Farewells to the German Democratic Republic, was published by Walter de Gruyter in 2021. This work examines dissatisfaction with the process of German reunification and its aftermath as expressed in imaginative literature from shortly after the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic to the present day.
Adam Roberts is Senior Instructor of English at the University of Alabama, where he teaches World, American, and African American Literature, as well as Composition. He is also Co-Director of the Comparative Literature Minor and serves on the Instructor Committee. Roberts is author of Hermann Hesse: Modern Romantic (Kendall Hunt, 2017) and The Beat Generation: Authorship and Persona (Kendall Hunt, 2017). His article “Man is Nothing Till He is United to an Image: On Truth, Lies, and the Nietzschean Mask in Yeats’s ‘The Player Queen’” is forthcoming (International Yeats Studies, 2024).
Christiane Schönfeld is Chair of the Department of German Studies at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, Ireland, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. She has published on representations of marginalized figures including prostitutes, exiles, and asylum seekers. Her recent work shows how literary texts and the cultural industry/adaptations of novels and plays for the cinema contribute to the public sphere. Among her publications are The History of German Literature on Film (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Ernst Toller’s A Youth in Germany (trans. Eoin and Eva Bourke, ed. with Lisa Marie Anderson; Broadview, 2024). She is one of the editors of the critical edition of the works Ernst Toller (6 vols., 2015) and serves on the editorial board of German Studies in India.
László V. Szabó is Associate Professor at the Institute of German Studies and Translation Studies of the University of Pannonia in Hungary. Since 2018 he has also been based at the German Department of the J. Selye University in Komárno, Slovakia. He received his PhD in Budapest in 2005 (with a dissertation on Hermann Hesse) and habilitated at the University of Pécs in 2016 (with a dissertation on Rudolf Pannwitz). He has received several fellowships in Germany and Austria, including Alexander von Humboldt fellowships at the University of Stuttgart (2014–15) and the University of Dortmund (2018). He is the author of monographs on Hermann Hesse and Rudolf Pannwitz (in German) and the aesthetics of the Stefan George circle (in Hungarian). He is co-editor of several volumes in German and English, such as Zwischen Kulturen und Medien: Zur medialen Inszenierung von Interkulturalität (Vienna, 2016) and Ereignis in Sprache, Literatur und Kultur/Event in Language, Literature and Culture (Berlin, 2021). He is also translator and author of studies, essays, and aphorisms.
Girissha Ameya Tilak is Assistant Professor at the Department of German, University of Mumbai. Her areas of specialization are European Cultural History, German Literature, and Didactics and Film Studies. Her PhD dissertation, Deutsche und Marathi: Kulturpoesie im 17. Jahrhundert: Angelus Silesius und Tukaram, was published by Königshausen & Neumann in 2019. She has been actively involved in the Marathi Language Teaching Project and has contributed to its publications of six levels of textbooks and workbooks. She was awarded the Preis der Gesellschaft für interkulturelle Germanistik für jüngere Forscherinnen und Forscher 2020.
Oscar von Seth is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University. His research interests are at the intersection of literature, cinema, and queer theories. Von Seth’s dissertation, “Outsiders and Others: Queer Friendships in Novels by Hermann Hesse” (2022), examines friendships between men in Hesse’s writing. His postdoctoral project, “Queer Waiting in Literature and Film” (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2024–2027), poses the question whether waiting, a universal human activity and an unavoidable aspect of life, can be understood as a queer cultural phenomenon.
Jennifer Walker is a writer and journalist specializing in topics relating to culture, travel, and art. After completing a PhD in Physics from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, she left her research and transitioned into writing full-time. She co-founded Panel Magazine, a literary journal focusing on contemporary art and literature in Central and Eastern Europe, in 2018 and is a founding editor for the independent publishing house Panel Literature Association. She co-authored Moon Prague, Vienna & Budapest (Hachette, 2022) and authored Moon Budapest & Beyond (Hachette, 2020). Her journalistic work has been featured on the BBC, CNN, The Times, National Geographic Travel, and Quartz, and her creative work has been published in the surrealist journals Lithaire and The Room and the literary journals The Penny Truth, Midwest Literary Magazine, and Literary Brushstrokes.
Yoichi Yamamoto was Professor of German Literature and Media Studies at Kyushu Kyoritsu University, where he was also Director of the International Exchange Center. He also held a number of important positions related to education: Evaluator of “Japan Institution for Higher Education (JIHEE)” (2008–17), which is authorized by MEXT as a certified Evaluation and Accreditation Agency for universities, and Entrance Examination Question (German) creator at the “National Center for University Entrance Examinations” (2017–20). He is also the Director of the Japanese Hermann Hesse Society “Hermann Hesse Freundeskreis/Forschungsgruppe Japan” (2012–present). His most recent publications as co-editor and co-translator include the complete works of Hermann Hesse, Hermann Hesse Zenshu (Hermann Hesse: Complete Collection of Literary Works), in sixteen volumes and Hermann Hesse Essay Zenshu (Hermann Hesse: Complete Collection of Essays) in eight volumes (both by Rinsen Shoten, 2005–12).
Michał Zawadzki is Associate Professor in Industrial Engineering and Management at the Uppsala University Division of Industrial Engineering and Management, where he serves as Program Director for the Master’s Program in Industrial Management and Innovation. He has authored several articles about critical higher education studies and critical management studies, and co-edited the volume The Future of University Education (Palgrave).
Chunhua Zhan is Professor of Foreign Literature and Comparative Literature at the College of Humanities, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics. She is the author of Hermann Hesse and the East (Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press, 2018) and Outline and Bibliography of German Translations of Ancient Chinese Literature (China Literature and History Press, 2011). She has served as a visiting scholar at Heidelberg University (2007), Munich University (2016–17), and the University of Arizona (2023).