PaweÅ JÄdrzejko is Associate Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, and a faculty member in the PhD Programme in Studies in English Literatures, Language, and Translation at Sapienza University of Rome. His research spans nineteenth-century American literature, literary and cultural theory, comparative studies, and translation philosophy, with particular emphasis on Herman Melville, dialogic ethics, and the philosophy of friendship. He is the author of the first monographs on Herman Melville published in Polish and has co-edited numerous international volumes and journal issues devoted to American literature and cultural theory. He is a co-author ofAtmospheric Health, Nature, and Well-being: Towards a Philosophy of the Garden(Routledge, 2025). He served as President of the International American Studies Association (2021-2023), is Co-Founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of theReview of International American Studies, and has held ministerial and international advisory appointments in higher education policy, open access, and academic governance.

John Matteson is Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He holds an A.B. in history from Princeton University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. His scholarship focuses on nineteenth-century American literature, intellectual history, and the intersections of literary, moral, and legal thought. He is the author ofEden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, which received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, andThe Lives of Margaret Fuller, awarded the 2012 Ann M. Sperber Prize for Best Biography of a Journalist, as well asA Worse Place than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation(2021). He has published widely in leading journals, includingLeviathan,New England Quarterly, andHarvard Theological Review, and is a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.