SINS brings together different ways of working with narratives. This difference is reflected in the traditions, methods and choice of empirical data represented by the staff of lectures with some originating in literary narratology, some in linguistic, psychological and sociological analysis and others in transmedial narrative study.
Roy Sommer is Professor of English and the director of the Center for Graduate Studies at the University of Wuppertal. He is the co-founder of the interdisciplinary Center for Narrative Research at Wuppertal, and has been a member of the Executive Board since 2007. Roy Sommer is the author of two monographs (Fictions of Migration, 2001; Von Shakespeare bis Monty Python, 2011). He has co-edited four books, including Narratology in the Age of Interdisciplinary Narrative Research (2009). He has published extensively on fictional and factual storytelling and narrative theory. He is the co-editor of DIEGESIS, a bilingual open access journal and the first interdisciplinary journal dedicated to narrative research that provides free online access to full-text articles and reviews. Roy Sommer is scientific coordinator of the EU Horizon 2020 project “Crises as Opportunities: Towards a Level Telling Field on Migration and a New Narrative of Successful Integration.”
Dr. Ruth Page is a Reader in Stylistics at University of Birmingham. Her research interests focus on narrative analysis, computer-mediated communication and language and gender and includes both literary-critical and discourse analytic approaches to narrative, exploring storytelling examples found in literary, conversational, and social media contexts. Her monograph Narratives Online: Shares Stories in Social Media (2018) developing a new framework - 'Mediated Narrative Analysis' - to address the large scale, multimodal nature of online narratives, helping researchers interpret the micro- and macro-level politics that are played out in computer-mediated communication. The book won the Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. In 2011, she published Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction and the co-edited the anthology New narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age. She has since published extensively on the narrative dimensions of social media storytelling in monographs, anthologies and journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse, Context and Media, and Critical Discourse Studies.
Maria Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Tampere University, Finland. Her publications deal with storification and the storytelling boom; the neoliberal logic of narrative and fiction; exemplarity; consciousness, voice, and realism across media; the literary tradition of adultery; authorial ethos; and critical applications of postclassical narratologies. She has been leading three research projects that deal with the contemporary instrumentalization of narratives: the Instrumental Narratives consortium (Academy of Finland 2018– 2022), Dangers of Narrative (Kone Foundation 2017– 2020), and Storytelling in Information Systems Development (Aaltonen Foundation 2019– 2022). Among her recent publications is the co-editing of The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory (2022).