Hester Baer is Professor of German and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research and teaching focus on German literature and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, film history, feminist media studies, and environmental humanities. Her recent publications include the monograph German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism (2021) and the edited volume Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture (2024). She currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of The German Quarterly.

Michele M. Mason is an Associate Professor of Japanese literary and cultural studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, whose works include Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context and Critique and Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and the Modern Nation State. She has dedicated herself to anti-nuclear studies, education, and activism, which is embodied in her co-produced short documentary film entitled Witness to Hiroshima (2008) and a monograph in progress on the legacy of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.