Susanne Hamscha is a native of Vienna, where she grew up to the music of Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, developing a passion for all things American at a very young age. Susanne decided to turn her passion into her profession when she enrolled into the English and American Studies program at the University of Vienna. After the completion of her undergraduate courses, she spent a year abroad at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she was accepted into the Graduate Certificate Program in Advanced Feminist Studies. Susanne earned her M.A. (Magister) in 2007 and the applied to the Ph.D. program at the Graduate School of North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. From 2008 until 2011, she worked on her dissertation in Berlin, her project funded by the German Research Foundation as part of the Excellence Initiative passed by the Federal and State Governments. Susanne’s dissertation, which analyzes the construction of “Americanness” in “classic” American literature and contemporary popular culture, was published with Campus Verlag in 2013. After the completion of her doctorate degree, she taught and researched at the University of Goettingen and at Columbia University before she returned to Austria to assume a position at the University of Graz. This July, Susanne joined the team at Fulbright Austria and will use her expertise in the Austrian and American academic landscapes to assist scholars on both sides of the Atlantic and ensure that their Fulbright experience will be successful and memorable.