President
Josef Raab teaches North American Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 1993 and his post-doctoral Habilitation degree from the Catholic University of Eichstätt in 2000. From 2000 to 2004 he was Professor of North American Literature and Culture at Bielefeld University and since 2004 he has been Chair of North American Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Since 2009 he has served as the founding president of the International Association of Inter-American Studies. In 2010 he was the local organizer of the association’s First Biennial Conference. Josef Raab’s research interests include Inter-American Studies, ethnicity (especially U.S. Latinas and Latinos), borders, cultural hybridity, and the whole range of U.S. American literature—with some glances at other literatures in the Americas. He has also written on Latino Catholicism in the U.S., television, film, and transnationalism in the Americas. So far, Josef Raab has edited or co-edited eleven books. Most recent among those are a bilingual volume of essays entitled Screening the Americas: Narrations of Nation in Documentary Film as well as the essay collections Interculturalism in North America: Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Beyond and New World Colors: Ethnicity, Belonging, and Difference in the Americas. Since 2011 he has also been one of the editors of the book series “Inter-American Studies|Estudios Interamericanos,” published by Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier in Europe and by Bilingual Press in the Americas.
Vice President
Maria Herrera-Sobek is Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Academic Policy and Professor of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was the Luis Leal Endowed Chair during1997- 2009. She received her Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literature from UCLA and has taught at UC Irvine, Harvard University, and Stanford University. Her publications include: The Bracero Experience: Elitelore Versus Folklore; The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis; Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song; and Chicano Folklore: A Handbook. She has edited/co-edited the following books: Beyond Stereotypes: A Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature; Chicana Creativity and Criticism; Gender and Print Culture; Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage: Hispanic Colonial Literature of the Southwest; Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film; Saga de México; Culture Across Borders: The Popular Culture of Mexican Immigration; Cultura: Al otro lado de la frontera: Immigración y cultura popular; Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage: Vol. III; Power, Race and Gender in Academe; Santa Barraza: Artist of the Borderlands; Chicano Renaissance; Perspectivas transatlánticas en la literature chicana; and Violence; Transgression in World Minority Literatures and Cien Años de Lealtad/One Hundred Years of Lealty. Vol. I & II; Critical Insights: The House on Mango Street: Sandra Cisneros—A Reader (2011). Associate Editor: The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2011); Editor: Celebrating Latino Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Cultural Traditions 3 Vols. (2012). Editor/coeditor of Special Issues including: Journal of American Studies Association, Turkey (JAST); Concentric Journal (Taiwan); Nerter (Canary Islands); American Studies Journal of Germany Transfrontera: Transnational Perspectives on the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. Number 57 (2012). Herrera-Sobek has published over 140 scholarly articles and published her poetry in journals and anthologies.
Honors/Awards/Elected Positions: Modern Language Association, Division of Chicano and Latino Literature: Distinguished Scholar Award (2004); UCLA Spanish and Portuguese Department: Distinguish Alumnus for 2007-08; Fellow – three weeks in residence at University of Bielefeld, Germany’s Research Institute (March 2013)
NSF–PAID (Partnership for Adaptation, Implementation and Dissemination) three year grant ($500,000) UCSB Co-PI (2007-2010). Grant for Sixth International Corrido Conference. May 8, 9, and 10, 2008, from the Arhoolie Foundation. $20,000. NSF ADVANCE Grant $300,000 Co- Principal Investigator (2011-2014). Modern Language Association Executive Council (MLA has approx. 30,000 membership—it is the largest Humanities association in the USA. (2010-2014)
Executive Director
Wilfried Raussert is Chair and Professor of North American Literary and Cultural Studies and Director of Inter-American Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. He is founder and general editor of the ejournal fiar forum for inter-american research (www.interamerica.de), the online journal of the International Association of Inter-American Studies. Since 2009 he has been executive manager of the International Association of Inter-American Studies. Currently he is the chair of the research project The Americas as Space of Entanglement(s) at Bielefeld University funded by the German ministry for education and research. This project brings together projects of four postdoc research fellows and ten doctoral students working on cultural, political, and historical aspects of the Americas. Moreover, he is Fulbright representative and director of the DAAD exchange program with the Universidad de Guadalajara. Among his recent publications are the edited volumes Cityscapes in the Americas: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film (2011), Cornbread and Cuchifritos: Ethnic Identity Politics, Transnationalization, and Transculturation in American Urban Popular Music (2011), (Re)Discovering ‘America, (Re)Descubriendo ‘América’: Road Movies and Other Travel Narratives in North America (2012). He is currently working on a book project titled Mobilizing America/América: Toward a Blueprint for Inter-American Studies and a companion for Inter-American Research. He received his MA and PhD at the University of Mississippi, Oxford and completed his ‘habilitation’ at Humboldt University Berlin. He held visiting professorships at the University of Mississippi, at the Universidad de Guadalajara and at Humboldt University Berlin. From 2004 until 2006 he was Professor of North American Literatures at University College Cork, Ireland.
Treasurer
Heidrun Moertl is a faculty member (Scientist) at the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. She is currently working on her dissertation in the fields of Indigenous and Aging Studies with a focus on the Great Lakes Ojibwe people. Her teaching focus lies on the indigenous populations of the Americas, where she pays special attention to Identity Politics and Inter-American discourses. She has further lectured at universities in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovenia, and taught at the International Summer School ‘Broadcasting the Americas’ in Bielefeld in 2014. At the Center for Inter-American Studies she has worked in a number of research and administrative projects, among them as project coordinator of the International Summer School on the Americas. She currently serves on the Executive Board of the International Association for Inter-American Studies (Treasurer), the Steering Committee of the American Indian Workshop and is the founding Executive Director of the European Network in Aging Studies. Her publications include: Comparative American Studies: An International Journal titled “Hemispheric Approaches to Native American Studies” (with Barrenechea, Maney Publishing, 2013).