Karen S. Feldman is Professor in the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley. She works at the intersection of critical theory, literary theory, and philosophy, on topics related to narrative and figurality. She is author of Arts of Connection: Poetry, History, Epochality (2019), which examined the ways that narrated events are represented as connected, in texts ranging from Aristotle to twentieth-century phenomenology; and Binding Words: Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger (2006), which explored the figural depiction of the phenomenon of moral conscience in modern philosophy. She is co-editor of Violent Origins: Freud, Moses, Religion, with Gilad Sharvit (2018) and Continental Philosophy: An Anthology, with Will McNeill (1998).Professor Feldman is also co-editor (with Rüdiger Campe) of the Paradigms book series at De Gruyter. She has taught seminars on philosophy and cultural studies at the Europa-Universität Viadrina, Universität Potsdam, Universität Konstanz, and the FU Berlin. Previous research fellowships include a Fulbright scholarship, a fellowship from the Alexander-von-Humboldt foundation, LFSP „Aufklärung – Religion – Wissen” (Halle-Wittenberg) and a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.

Ricardo Stalder is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of German Studies at the University of Zurich, where he is part of the division of Medieval and Early Modern German Literature. He is a member of the research project "Narrative Microeconomies of the Early Modern Period," directed by Prof. Dr. Christian Kiening and supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). His research primarily focuses on sixteenth-century vernacular literature (e.g. prose romance and Schwank literature), and he has written on topics such as economy, fraud, deception, and the devil. In his dissertation, he explores the interplay between alchemy and economy by analyzing various representations and figurations of the alchemist in literary and scientific discourses of the sixteenth century.