November 2025

Veronika Fuechtner is Chair of Comparative Literature and Associate Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth. She also teaches in Jewish Studies, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. In addition, she occasionally has held an appointment as Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Education at the Geisel School of Medicine. She is the author of Berlin Psychoanalytic (University of California Press, 2011) and the co-editor of Imagining Germany, Imagining Asia (Camden House, 2013) and A Global History of Sexual Science 1880-1960 (University of California Press, 2017). She recently completed a monograph on Thomas and Heinrich Mann's Brazilian mother, Julia Mann, and the Mann family construction of race and “Germanness." And she is the editor of the forthcoming Norton critical edition of Susan Bernofsky’s translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Her research interests include the history of psychoanalysis and sexology, the relationship between science and culture, discourses on race and ethnicity, German-language modernism, contemporary culture, German-language film, and global cultural and scientific histories. She has received research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, The American Academy in Berlin, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences Research Council. She is serving on the editorial board of PMLA and she chairs the conduct and anti-harassment committee of the GSA.

Morten Høi Jensen is a Danish-American writer and critic and the author of A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen(2017) and The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (2025). He has contributed to Liberties, the New York Review of Books, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Commonweal.

Sandra Kegel studied literature, theater, film and media studies in Aix-en-Provence, Vienna and Frankfurt. She has been an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung since 1999. She worked in media and literature departments for many years and has been head of the FAZfeatures section since 2019. She also works as a juror and presenter and is a regular critic on the literary program “Buchzeit” (3sat). In 2005, she was awarded the Ravensburg Media Prize. During her 2025 fellowship at the Thomas Mann House, Sandra Kegel is investigating the extent to which the decline of the (local) press is promoting populism and mistrust in democratic structures and what lessons can be learned from the findings for the German newspaper landscape. She will also examine the use of AI in media companies and its implications for the journalistic ecosystem. 

Lorraine Ali is television critic of the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she was a senior writer for the Calendar section where she covered culture at large, entertainment and American Muslim issues. Ali is an award-winning journalist and Los Angeles native who has written in publications ranging from the New York Times to Rolling Stone and GQ. She was formerly The Times’ music editor and before that, a senior writer and music critic with Newsweek magazine. Her writing awards include Best Online Feature from the New York Association of Black Journalists in 2007, an Excellence in Journalism Award in 2002 from the National Arab Journalists Association. In 1996, she won Best National Feature Story honors at the Music Journalism Awards.

Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, covering Southern California everything and a bunch of the West and beyond. He was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary and the Mike Royko Award for Commentary and Column Writing and was part of the team that won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News for reporting on a leaked audio recording that upended Los Angeles politics. Arellano previously worked at OC Weekly, where he was an investigative reporter for 15 years and editor for six, wrote a column called ¡Ask a Mexican! and is the author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.” He’s the child of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.

Susanne Beyer studied German literature, history and journalism in Bamberg and Vienna. After her vocational training at Deutsche Journalistenschule (DJS), she initially worked as a culture editor at SPIEGEL, a German weekly news magazine and one of the largest such publications in Europe, where she was deputy head of department. She was deputy editor-in-chief of SPIEGEL for four years, then worked as a journalist in SPIEGEL's Berlin office and now writes for the editorial team. Alongside her job, Susanne Beyer is currently training to become a mediator. Beyer is a 2025 Thomas Mann Fellow.

Cordula Meyer, born in 1971, has been deputy editor-in-chief of SPIEGEL, Germanys leading political website und magazin, since 2024. She studied political science and communication in Hamburg and at the University of Arizona in Tucson, graduating with an M.A. She has worked at SPIEGEL since 1999, initially as a reporter at the National Desk and later as a correspondent in Washington, covering the election and presidency of Barack Obama. She became the head of the National Desk in 2015. In 2023, she became a member of SPIEGEL's editorial desk. As a reporter she has covered how 9/11 was planned in Hamburg and the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. She has been involved in volunteer work with Netzwerk Recherche, an organization promoting investigative reporting, for many years.

Heinrich Wefing is a multi-award-winning journalist, architecture critic and book author. After many years at the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) as cultural correspondent in Berlin, and West Coast correspondent in San Francisco, he moved to DIE ZEIT in 2008, a major German national weekly newspaper. Since 2018, he has headed the politics department there. Wefing is one of the initiators of the Charter of Fundamental Digital Rights of the European Union, which was published at the end of November 2016.

Sandra Kegel studied literature, theater, film and media studies in Aix-en-Provence, Vienna and Frankfurt. She has been an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung since 1999. She worked in the media and literature departments for many years and has been head of the FAZ features section since 2019. She also works as a juror and presenter and is a regular critic on the literary program “Buchzeit” (3sat). In 2005, she was awarded the Ravensburg Media Prize.