Karen J. Head, PhD, is the author of Disrupt This!: MOOCs and the Promises of Technology (a nonfiction book about issues in contemporary higher education), as well as five books of poetry (Lost on Purpose, Sassing, My Paris Year, Shadow Boxes and On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year). She also co-edited the poetry anthologies Mother Mary Comes to Me: An Anthology of Popular Culture and Teaching as a Human Experience: An Anthology of Poetry, and has exhibited several acclaimed digital poetry projects, including her project "Monumental" (part of Antony Gormley's One and Other Project) which was detailed in a TIME online mini-documentary. Her poetry appears in a number of national and international journals and anthologies. In 2010 she won the Oxford International Women's Festival Poetry Prize. She is editor of the international poetry journal Atlanta Review. On a more unusual note, she is currently the Poet Laureate of Waffle House - a title that reflects an outreach program to bring arts awareness to rural high schools in Georgia, which has been generously sponsored by the Waffle House Foundation. She was the inaugural Poet Laureate of Fulton County, Georgia. She is the Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs, and Professor of English and World Languages, at Augusta University. For twenty years, Head has been a visiting artist and scholar at the Institute for American Studies at Technische Universität Dortmund in Germany.

Sandra Danneil received her PhD in the American Studies at TU Dortmund University, Germany, where she currently works as a PostDoc and does research for her second book. In her dissertation project on The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror: A Cultural History of the Digital Age she worked in the field of American cultural, television, and media studies. With a Master's degree in film- and television studies, Sandra Danneil has specialized in horror and gender studies, popular pessimism, and dystopian studies. Within this field, she teaches classes on film, representations of Blackness, video games, as well as auteurs like John Carpenter, Stephen King, and Margaret Atwood. Since 2020 she hosts the "Fear Academy" podcast on Spotify and an Instagram account of the same name to teach students in the production of creative content.

Randi Gunzenhaeuser is professor of American studies and the media at Dortmund University of Technology. She studied American literary and cultural studies as well as theater at Scripps College, California, and the University of Munich where she completed her PhD. In addition to articles on American literature, digital culture, theories of power, as well as urban studies, she published Horror at Home: Genre, Gender und das Gothic Sublime and her post-doctoral thesis (Habilitationsschrift) on machine people, Automaten - Roboter - Cyborgs: Körperkonzepte im Wandel. She taught American literary and cultural studies as well as media studies at University of Munich, Chemnitz University of Technology, and Siegen University.