Cord-Christian Casper studied English and German Literature at Cambridge University and Kiel University. After the completion of his doctoral project on anarchism in early English modernism, he is now a research associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (Essen). His post-doc project focusses on literary temporalities and eco-poetics; further research areas include contemporary long novels, text-image-relations, modernist language theory, and New Materialisms of all stripes.

Publications (Selection): »The Fourth Dimension and Impossible Knowledge in Edwardian Speculative Fiction.« Literature and Knowledge. Bern: Lang, 2018.; »The hard, definite, personal word – Ordnung in frühmodernistischer Sprachphilosophie.« Patterns of Disorder: Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Un/ordnung. Berlin and Münster: LIT, 2017.

David Höwelkröger is a PhD candidate at the Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel. He received both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Media Studies and English Literature and Culture from the University of Paderborn. His research interests include videographic criticism and YouTube, popular media cultures and transmedia forms of animation.  He is currently working on his PhD thesis on film education and audiovisual essays on YouTube. His current publications can be seen under ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8107-3418.

Publications: under ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8107-3418.

Sarah Jawaid studies Art History and Media Studies: Film and Television at Kiel University. She is currently doing her master's degree and works as a research assistant at the Art History Department. She joined CLOSURE in 2022 due to her personal interest in comics.
Already in her bachelor thesis Gaming Experiences on the Edge of the Narrative. The Virtual World of the Video Game Abzû she explored visual narration. Her research interests include Game Studies, visual storytelling, diversity, sound in AV media, film and media aesthetics. 

Contact: sarah.jawaid[@]outlook.de

Dorothee Marx studied English and American Literatures Cultures and Media at Kiel University. She is currently employed as a research associate and lecturer at the chair of American Studies at Kiel University. Her PhD project is titled Bodies Irregular. Temporalities of Dis/ability in Contemporary North American Literature and examines the life narratives of traumatized, disabled or chronically ill characters in comics and novels. She is the first recipient of the Martin Schüwer Publication Award for Excellence in Comic Studies for her article The ›Affected Scholar‹. Reading Raina Telgemeier’s Ghosts as a Disability Scholar and Cystic Fibrosis-Patient that appeared in CLOSURE in 2018. 

Contact: marx[@]anglistik.uni-kiel.de

Susanne Schwertfeger currently works as a research associate and lecturer at the department of Art History at Kiel University, mainly teaching 20th and 21st century art, after previously studying History of Art, pre- and early history, classical archeology and ancient history at the university. In her postdoctoral thesis project, she is investigating visualization concepts of the Gothic Novel. Her other main areas of interest include post-1945 art, contemporary ceramics, photography and illustration.

Publications: under ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-5146-9549.

Contact: schwertfeger[@]kunstgeschichte.uni-kiel.de

Dennis Wegner studied German, English and Russian in Kiel and Irkutsk. In 2017, Dennis received a Fulbright Scholarship and worked as a Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at Dartmouth College and began a PhD In German Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University in 2019. In 2025, he completed his dissertation project, titled Queer Multilingualism: Russian-German Literary Crossings. Research interests include literary multilingualism and translation studies; film and television studies; comics studies, queer theory.

Lukas R.A. Wilde completed his PhD in Media Studies at the University of Tübingen on the ›mangaification‹ of public spaces in Japan, worked at the Collaborative Research Centre 923 »Threatened Orders« (»Bedrohte Ordnungen«), and is now a Professor in the Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. He serves as the second board member of the Society for Comics Research (ComFor) and is co-founder of the Digital Artist Initiative Comic Solidarity as well as co-initiator of the GINCO Award (the inclusive German comics prize for the independent scene).

Publications (Selection): Transmedia Character Studies (with Tobias Kunz), New York: Routledge, 2023; Comicanalyse: Eine Einführung (with Stephan Packard, Andreas Rauscher, Véronique Sina, Jan-Noël Thon and Janina Wildfeuer), Stuttgart: Metzler, 2019; Im Reich der Figuren: Meta-narrative Kommunikationsfiguren und die ›Mangaisierung‹ des japanischen Alltags, Köln: Herbert von Halem, 2018.

Kontakt: lukas.r.a.wilde [@] ntnu.no

Victoria Allen studied English Literature and Cultural Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Basel and Modern and Contemporary Studies at the University of Newcastle. Since June 2016, she has been working as a research associate in Media and Cultural Studies in the English Department of Kiel University. She is currently working towards her PhD on contemporary cultural representation and reception of Northernness in North-East England. In her dissertation project she combines her research interests in Cultural Studies, popular culture and qualitative research methods. In this regard, she is currently working on practices of cultural representation in football, folk/indie music and exhibition cultures.
Contact: allen[@]anglistik.uni-kiel.de

Sandro Esquivel studied computer science and media education at Kiel University and completed his PhD in computer vision in 2015. Since 2017, he has been employed as a permanent staff member at the department of computer science with focus on teaching activities. For CLOSURE, he takes care of the technical aspects of the online journal and supports the team in maintaining the internet presence.
Contact: sae[@]informatik.uni-kiel.de