Pavlína Flajšarová, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Palacký University Olomouc. A former Fulbright visiting researcher in Washington, D.C., she authored?The Bridge and the Eclipse,?Poetry in Great Britain and Northern Ireland after 1945,?Diaspora in the Fiction of Andrea Levy, and?Grace Nichols Universal and Diverse. She co-authored books on Scottish fiction and Canadian literary history. Her work centers on British ethnic and diasporic literature.
Jirí Flajšar is a Czech scholar and associate professor at Palacký University, Olomouc, specializing in American and Canadian literature, suburban literature, and contemporary poetry. His notable publications include Epiphany in American Poetry (2003), The Culture of American Suburbs (2016), and Chapters in Contemporary Canadian Literature (2014). He has also co-edited Cultural Studies Alive (2015) and published research on postwar American poetry and suburban identity.
Florian Freitag is Professor of American Literary and Media Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, specializing in (sub)urban studies, themed spaces, tourism, and queer studies. Previously assistant professor at JGU Mainz and visiting scholar at CUNY, he earned his Habilitation in 2019 and Ph.D. in 2011. His publications include?Popular New Orleans?and?The Farm Novel in North America, as well as key works on theme parks, intermediality, and nationalism in heritage sites.
Becky Nicolaides is a historian specializing in North American suburban history, focusing on suburban diversity and politics. She earned her PhD in American history from Columbia University. Nicolaides is the author of My Blue Heaven (2002), co-editor of The Suburb Reader (2016), and author of The New Suburbia (2024). She has also consulted on historic preservation and civic memory projects in Los Angeles and is a research affiliate at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.
Andrew Wiese is a Professor of U.S. Urban and Environmental History at San Diego State University, specializing in suburbanization, housing history, race, space, and power dynamics. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University. Wiese is the author of Places of Their Own (2004). He co-edited The Suburb Reader (2006, 2016) with Becky Nicolaides, a key text on American suburban history. His current research focuses on environmental politics and social justice in California, especially San Diego.