Bernhard Klein is Professor Emeritus at the University of Kent. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture.
Gesa Mackenthun is Professor in American Studies at Rostock University in Germany. In addition to numerous essays on the topics of nineteenth-century American literature, colonialism, and postcolonial studies, she is the author of Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637.