Alfrun Kliems is Professor of West Slavic Literatures and Cultures Studies at the Department for Slavic and Hungarian Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research interests include: language change and transcultural phenomena; literatures of exile and the urban underground in East-Central Europe as well as East-Central European Romanticism in comics. She published several monographs about East-Central European literature and edited, among others, the three-volume standard work Poetry of the 20th Century in East-Central Europe.