Funding for the speaker series was kindly provided by the Research Center of Social and Cultural Studies in Mainz. The organizer thanks the coordinating committee for their generous support. He also would like to thank Dr. Elisabeth Sommerlad, speaker of the junior research group Immersive Spaces, for her tireless support and recognize Marion Punches for her work on posters and promotional materials. Further insitutional and administrative support was provided by the Fachbereich 05 at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz as well as by the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies.