Gesa Mackenthun is Professor of American Studies at Rostock University. Her publications include Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature (Routledge, 2004), Metaphors of Dispossession. American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), and (co-edited with Bernhard Klein) Sea Changes. Historicizing the Ocean (Routledge, 2004). She was the initiator and first spokesperson of the graduate school “Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship” funded by the German Research Foundation (2006-15).

The resulting conference series she edits (8 volumes so far) include Entangled Knowledge. Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference (2012, with Klaus Hock), Agents of Transculturation (2014, with Sebastian Jobs), and Fugitive Knowledge (2015, with Andreas Beer). DEcolonial Heritage: Natures, Cultures and the Asymmetries of Memory is an upcoming volume (edited with Aníbal Arregui). Her current research deals with nineteenth-century imperial travel and archaeology and the scientific constructions of American antiquity.