Thomas Austenfeld is professor of American Literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He holds a “First State Exam” from the University of Münster, Germany, as well as MA and PhD degrees in English Language and Literature from the University of Virginia. Before coming to Fribourg, he taught in Virginia, Missouri, Utah, and Georgia. His research concerns American modernist poets and prose writers as well as comparative approaches to the European literary tradition. Other fields of interest in American Studies are Western American Literature, Biography, Southern Cultures, and the writers of realism and naturalism.