Alexandra Ganser, who is an Alumna of the Fulbright FLTA program (University of Oklahoma at Norman, 2003/04), was appointed professor for American literary and cultural studies at the University of Vienna in October 2017. Prof. Ganser is also Executive Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies (ZKS) and Key Researcher of the interdisciplinary research platform Mobile Cultures and Societies at the University of Vienna, where she leads an FWF (Austrian Research Fund)-funded project on pirate narratives from the colonial to the Antebellum era. She holds a doctoral and post-doctoral (Habilitation) degree in American literary and cultural studies from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Her dissertation was published as Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970-2000 (Rodopi, 2009). In 2010, she was Christoph-Daniel-Ebeling Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. Her research interests include maritime mobility, popular culture, gender studies, transatlantic American studies, astrocultures, and ecocriticism. Her current book project examines transatlantic representations of piracy before the Civil War and is titled Crisis and Discourses of (Il)Legitimacy in Transatlantic Narratives of Piracy, 1678-1865. It will be published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. Other book publications include: Pirates, Drifters, Fugitives: Figures of Mobility in American Culture and Beyond (ed. with Heike Paul & Katharina Gerund, 2012) and Transgressive Television: Politics, Crime, and Citizenship in 21st-Century American TV Series (ed. with Birgit Daewes and Nicole Poppenhagen, 2015). She also serves as President of the Austrian Association for American Studies (2017-18). For more details, please visit: anglistik.univie.ac.at/home/staff-members/ganser/