Philipp Schweighauser is Associate Professor and Head of American and General Literatures at the University of Basel. He is the author of The Noises of American Literature, 1890-1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics (UP Florida, 2006), co-editor of a special issue of the journal Speculations entitled Aesthetics in the 21st Century, and co-editor of three essay collections: Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (MLA, 2007), Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo (Continuum, 2010), and Haunted Narratives: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma (U of Toronto P, 2013). He recently completed his second book manuscript "Beautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art, 1750-1828," which explores deception as a political, epistemological, and aesthetic topos in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European reflections on art and sensuous cognition as well as contemporaneous American literature, painting, and sculpture. He is currently co-directing a three-year research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and entitled "Of Cultural, Poetic, and Medial Alterity: The Scholarship, Poetry, Photographs, and Films of Edward Sapir, Ruth Fulton Benedict, and Margaret Mead" (2014-2017). He is the President of the Swiss Association for North American Studies.