Issue 4 | Contributors

Manuela Achilles is Professor of German and History at the University of Virginia and Director of the Center for German Studies. She works on Weimar democracy, fascism, Holocaust memory, and sustainability; recent publications include Invisible Fatherland: Constitutional Patriotism in Weimar Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2026) and “Nazis into Victims: Holocaust Fiction without Perpetrators” (literaturkritik.de, 2024).

Catherine Baker is Reader in Twentieth-Century History at the University of Hull. She specializes in the cultural history and politics of national, European, and LGBTQ+ identity-making in post-Cold War Europe, and the international politics of mega-events. She has written and edited nine books since 2010, including the forthcoming Performing Queer Nations: the Eurovision Song Contest Since 1990 (Manchester University Press).

Luca Cian is the Killgallon Ohio Art Professor of Marketing and Chair of the Marketing Area at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. His research on visual persuasion, social identity, and consumer responses to artificial intelligence has been published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, and Nature Communications, among other places. His work has received several awards, including the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Cialdini Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Field Research in Social Psychology (2025), the BSPA Publication Award for Innovation in Behavioral Policy (2024), and the American Marketing Association CB SIG Research in Practice Award (2021).

Kerem Coşar is Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia and a research affiliate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and CESifo. He received his PhD at Pennsylvania State University in 2010. He previously held positions at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Stockholm School of Economics. His research focuses on international trade, economic geography, and economic history. He is an associate editor at the Journal of International Economics.

Peter Debaere is Tipton Snavely Professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He is an international economist and an expert in the economics of water; he has published in leading field and general-interest journals, and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

Zvi Gilboa holds a PhD in German Literature and Culture from Indiana University, as well as a Master of Music in Piano Performance degree from Indiana University. Gilboa is currently Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia, where he is also a core member of the Jewish Studies Program and Center for German Studies. Gilboa’s research interests lie in the fields of transnational studies, German literature and culture, transnational literature in Hebrew, and language pedagogy, the latter with strong emphasis on cultural and literary authorship by non-native speakers.

Ella Jackson is a PhD student in critical studies in music and sound at the University of Virginia. She holds a first-class BA in music from the University of Oxford (St John’s College) and studies the intersection of sound, identity, and power, with a particular focus on music’s role in mass politics and ideology.

Kyrill Kunakhovich is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Communism’s Public Sphere: Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany (Cornell University Press, 2022). His current book project is entitled “The Old Town: Warsaw, UNESCO, and the Polish Origins of World Heritage.”

John Pickles is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Geography and International Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. His research focuses on global value changes, regional economic development, and social theory. He has carried out research in Bulgaria since 1989 and currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Bulgarian Geographical Society. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Ivan Raykoff is Professor of Music at The New School, where he teaches courses on music history, music theory, film music, and interdisciplinary arts. His book Dreams of Love: Playing the Romantic Pianist (Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the concert pianist as a cultural icon. He co-edited A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2007, and his follow-up book about the contest’s music is Another Song for Europe: Music, Taste, and Values in the Eurovision Song Contest (Routledge, 2021).

Dean Vuletic is a historian of contemporary Europe who specializes in the Eurovision Song Contest, including as a prominent media commentator and public speaker. He began teaching the world’s first university course on Eurovision at New York University; as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Fellow at the University of Vienna, he then led a groundbreaking research project on the history of Eurovision. He holds a PhD in modern European history from Columbia University. 

Art Exhibition | Literary Excerpts

Allison M. Charette is a dedicated translator specializing in bringing fiction from Madagascar into English. She has translated Naivo’s Beyond the Rice Fields (2017) and Johary Ravaloson’s Return to the Enchanted Island (2019), both to critical acclaim. A co-founder of the Emerging Literary Translators’ Network in America and the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program, Charette is committed to supporting and mentoring new translators. In 2018, she was awarded an NEA Fellowship in Literary Translation to translate Michèle Rakotoson’s novel, Lalana.

Egana Djabbarova, born in 1992 into an Azerbaijani family in Yekaterinburg, Russia, is a poet, essayist, and scholar. She is the author of several collections of poetry. Having been forced to flee Russia in 2024 because of her LGBTQ activism and opposition to the war in Ukraine, she lives in Hamburg, Germany.

Lisa C. Hayden is a literary translator who received her MA in Russian literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She spent six years in Moscow and lives in Maine.

Nobuhiro Nakanishi is a Japanese artist born in Fukuoka who lives and works in Osaka, Japan. He studied fine arts at the Tokyo Zokei University and Kyoto City University of Art. Nakanishi’s works are different from what has traditionally been understood as sculpture-making. While sculpture involves representing images of humans or objects in three dimensions using media such as wood, stone, clay, or metal, he distances himself from the weight, gravity, and materiality of media related to sculpture. His expression addresses antithetical ideas of existence and absence, the material and the nonmaterial, and the visible and the invisible to generate in space visually imperceptible senses and conceptual territories such as consciousness, thoughts, or memories, as well as time, and he invites viewers into a mysterious experience. His work has been exhibited across Japan and internationally. 

Raharimanana, born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, is a novelist, essayist, poet, and multidisciplinary artist. As an editor, he co-founded Editions Project’îles with poet Nassuf Djailani. His latest literary publication, La Voix, le loin, 100 poèmes (2022), inspired the further creation of both a play and an installation of photography, music, and poetry that has been shown internationally. His work has garnered many prizes, from the 1990 Prix du Théâtre Interafricain for one of his earliest plays, translated into English as The Prophet and the President, to the 2023 Prix International Benjamin Fondane for his body of work, awarded annually to a non-French francophone writer. Since 2004, he has co-directed the Plumes d’Afrique festival of literary and artistic creation in francophone Africa.