Herwig Friedl (*1944) is Professor Emeritus of American Literature and History of Ideas at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. He studied American and German Literatures and Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg and at Cornell; he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale in 1973/4, a Visiting Professor at the University of New Mexico in 1984 and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard in 2002 and 2006. His book publications include a study of Henry James' aesthetic theory (1972) and - as editor - essay collections on E.L. Doctorow (1986), on Women Studies as Cultural Studies (2000), and on gender and conceptions of space (2006). His numerous essays focus on Transcendentalism, Pragmatism, Modernism (Gertrude Stein), and American thinking in an international context.