Biographical note

Christof Mauch is Director of the Rachel Carson Center and Director of the Lasky Center for Transatlantic Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. Before joining Munich University, he was the Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. Dr Mauch is the author or editor of more than 30 books, some of them award-winning, including Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies Toward a Global Environmental History (2009, edited with Christian Pfister), The World Beyond the Windshield: Landscapes and Roads in Europe and North America (2008, edited with Thomas Zeller), Rivers in History: Perspectives on Waterways in Europe and North America History (2008, edited with Thomas Zeller), Shadow War Against Hitler (2003), and Berlin - Washington, 1800–2000 (2005, edited with Andreas Daum). Kiran Klaus Patel is Professor of European History and Transatlantic Relations at the European University Institute, Florence. He is the author of multiple publications, including Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933–1945 (2005) and Fertile Ground for Europe? The History of European Integration and the Common Agricultural Policy since 1945 (2009). Professor Patel has directed and co-directed several large projects, particularly 'Imagined Europeans: The Scientific Construction of Homo Europaeus' and 'Europeanization and History: Concepts, Conflicts, Cohesion'.