Holly Yanacek is associate professor of German at JMU. Her research focuses on 19th- to 21st-century Germanophone literature and culture, emotion studies, narrative theory, gender studies, and posthumanism. Yanacek co-edited the interdisciplinary volume Animals, Machines, and AI: On Human and Non-Human Emotions in Modern German Cultural History, which examines the affective relationships between humans and non-human animals, robots, and machines in modern German cultural history.