David D. Kim is Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA, Associate Vice Provost of the International Institute, and the Community Engagement Advisor for the Division of Humanities at UCLA.

Tobias Boes is Professor of German and Chair of the Department of German, Slavic, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches courses on twentieth and twenty-first century German culture and on European Studies. He is the author of two books on Thomas Mann: Thomas Mann’s War (Cornell University Press, 2019), which won the GSA/DAAD best book award and was translated into both German and Russian, and the recently-published A Reader’s Guide to Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” (Camden House, 2025). Both titles are available as free eBooks thanks to generous grants from the recently defunded National Endowment for the Humanities, from Notre Dame’s Navari Family Center for Humanities and the Public Good, and from the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades. He is currently putting together a collected edition of Mann’s anti-Nazi speeches and writings, and also working on a new book project tentatively titled Affirming Flames: Cultural and Intellectual Defenses of Democracy during the Fascist 1930s.

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.