Founding Members
Nassim W. Balestrini (Speaker)
Nassim Winnie Balestrini is professor of American Studies and Intermediality. She chairs the American Studies Department and directs the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG). She has published monographs on Vladimir Nabokov and on opera adaptations of nineteenth-century American fiction, essays on hip-hop life writing and rap poetry (e.g., in Popular Music and Society and in the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music Studies), on intermediality theory and practice (e.g., a special issue on “Depicting Destitution Across Media” for the Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings), on American poetry, fiction, and drama. She has edited and co-edited essay collections in adaptation, intermediality, life writing, and ecocritical studies, and is the series editor of Studies in Intermediality (Brill/de Gruyter, with Irina Rajewsky). Her current research focuses on contemporary poetry, on climate change drama and theater, and on combining inter- and transmedial inquiries.
Julia Hoydis (Speaker)
Julia Hoydis is Professor of English Literary Studies from the 18th to the 21st Century. She works in in the field of Anglophone literary and cultural studies (British and postcolonial literatures); in September 2024 she took up the post as Full Professor of English Literature from the 18th to the 21st Century at the Department of English Studies at the University of Graz.
Previously, she was Professor of English Literature at the University of Klagenfurt (2023-2024) and Associate Director and Academic Coordinator of the Centre for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH) at the University of Cologne (2022-2023). She has also taught at the Universities of Duisburg-Essen, Cologne and Cambridge (Murray Edwards College).
Hoydis studied English Philology, Media Studies and Philosophy at the University of Cologne. In 2010, she completed her doctorate summa cum laude in the field of postcolonial studies with a thesis on ethics and storytelling in the work of Indian author Amitav Ghosh. For her habilitation thesis entitled ‘Risk and the English Novel. From Defoe to McEwan’ she was awared the venia legendi for English Literature and Cultural studies in 2018 (University of Cologne). Since 2019, she has been editor of the open access journal Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies.
Her research interests include the history and development of the English novel (from the 18th century to the present day), narratology, literature and science, posthumanism and digital narrative forms (including literature and AI), postcolonial studies and ecocriticism/environmental humanities. She is currently researching climate change narratives in particular, including in the FWF-funded joint project ‘Just Futures? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultural Climate Models’ (2023-2026), which she is co-leading with David Higgins (University of Leeds) and which deals with questions of intergenerational justice and ideas of climate futures in various media. Previously, she was Principal Investigator of the project ‘Climate Change Literacy’ (Volkswagen Foundation, 2021-2023).
Ulla Kriebernegg (Speaker)
Ulla Kriebernegg is Professor of Cultural Aging and Care Research and Founding Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (CIRAC) at the University of Graz, and Adjunct Professor at the Medical University of Graz. Trained in North American Studies, she now works on Age Studies and the Health Humanities, with a focus on narrative and media representations of later life, dementia, gender, and health. Her latest monograph Putting Age in Its Place: Long-Term Residential Care in Contemporary Film and Fiction (transcript, 2026) examines how care home narratives in Canadian and U.S. literature and film construct and contest the social imaginaries of old age. She has published on burden narratives and geronticide, dementia and cognitive decline, and aging and climate change, and co-edited Aging Studies and Ecocriticism: Interdisciplinary Encounters (Lexington, 2023) with Nassim Balestrini, Julia Hoydis, and Anna-Christina Kainradl.
Kriebernegg is currently a PI on "Transforming Anxieties of Ageing in Southeastern Europe" (Volkswagen Foundation, 2022–2027), a governing board member and co-applicant on "Aging in Data" (SSHRC Canada, 2021–2027), and a member of the EU Horizon Project "EU-CoWork" (2024–2028). The latest project, “Situated Vulnerability: Approaching Old Age in Health and Care Technologies from Feminist Ethics of Care Perspectives" (2026-2028, Elisabeth List-Fellowship), investigates how digital health and care technologies produce and negotiate vulnerability among older adults.
Ulla is a founding member and former president of the European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS), associate editor for Humanities and Arts at The Gerontologist, co-editor of the Bloomsbury Studies in the Humanities, Ageing and Later Life series, and a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, where she serves on the Board of Directors. She is a Fellow of the Trent Centre for Aging & Society (Canada), the AgeCap Center at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), and the Gerontological Society of America, where she is also a member of the Board of Directors. She has taught internationally and has received several research and teaching awards.
Anne Korfmacher
Anne Korfmacher is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of English Studies at the University of Graz, currently working on her habilitation (second book) project “Tracing the Elastic Mind: Resilience in Prose Fiction of the Long Nineteenth Century”. Her research spans Literary and Cultural Studies, Medical Humanities, Gender Studies and New Media Studies, and she is particularly interested in the historical theorisation of resilience, the analysis of gendered experiences of vulnerability and adaptation, and the study of narrative form across media.
Her monograph Fan Podcasts: Rewatch, Recap, Review (Routledge, 2024) offers a new formalist framework for analyzing the affordances of podcasting as a cultural and participatory medium. Further publications in international journals such as gender forum, kommunikation@gesellschaft, and Anglistik explore questions of gender, intimacy, and temporality, including an article on recoding podcast intimacy in Porn Studies. Alongside her work on resilience, she has developed research interests in care, health, and recovery narratives. She co-organized the 2025 DACH Victorianists workshop “Literature and Medicine” and is co-editing a volume on Medical Authority in Victorian Literature.
Stefan Schweigler
Stefan Schweigler is a postdoctoral researcher in media studies and is currently a visiting professor for the Theory and Aesthetics of Digital Media at the University of Vienna (Winter Term 2026). His publications address aging, dis/ability, media, etho-ecology, affect, and infrastructures of care, including a recently co-edited special issue of the International Journal of Ageing and Later Life (IJAL). His research focuses on queer-feminist media theory, intersectionality, aging and care, digitality, and global decolonial perspectives. His teaching portfolio includes Science and Technology Studies, intersectionality, inclusive design, queer cinema, and media ecology across the University of Vienna, the University of Klagenfurt, Masaryk University in Brno, the University of Arts and Design Linz, and the Zurich University of the Arts. He previously served as a researcher on the project “Gender Matters: Aging, Care, and Migration” (2022–24) at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care at the University of Graz. Schweigler is currently working on his habilitation (second monograph) titled “Co-Constituting Postdigitality and Old Age”. He is a member of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS), the German Society for Media Studies (GfM), and the European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS).
