Catrin Gersdorf teaches American literature at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University Berlin, Germany. The author of The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the (Re-) Construction of America (forthcoming), she co-edited Natur-Kultur-Text: Beitrage zu Okologie und Literaturwissenschaft (2005). Sylvia Mayer teaches American literature and culture at the English Department of Munster University, Germany. She is the author of a monograph on the environmental ethical dimension of New England Regionalist Writing 1865-1918 (Naturethik und Neuengland-Regionalliteratur, 2004), editor of Restoring the Connection to the Natural World: Essays on the African American Environmental Imagination (2003), and co-editor of Natur-Kultur-Text: Beitrage zu Okologie und Literaturwissenschaft (2005).