Teresa Hiergeist works at the Department of Romance Studies at Universit�t Wien, where she is responsible for French and Spanish literature and culture. She has done research about representations of societies, alternative and parallel communities, human-animal studies as well as queer and gender studies. Stefanie Sch�fer is a visiting Professor of North American Studies at Friedrich-Alexander Universit�t Erlangen-N�rnberg and a former Marie-Curie fellow at the Universit�t Wien. Her research in North American Studies covers Literary, Feminist, and Gender Studies, Visual and Popular Culture, and Mobility Studies.