Franziska Bomski is a literary scholar whose work focuses on the intersection of literature and science from the 18th century until the present. She earned a PhD from the University of Freiburg with a dissertation on mathematics in the writing of Novalis, which was published by De Gruyter as Die Mathematik im Denken und Dichten von Novalis in 2014. She has also written on the history of German literary scholarship, with a particular emphasis on the Nazi era, and on various themes in the works of Robert Musil, Christa Wolf, Dietmar Dath, and Manja Präkels. Currently, she is working on portrayals of shared experience in post-GDR literature. She has held teaching positions at Goethe University Frankfurt, Yale University, and Beihang University, and she was a Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis. From 2012 to 2018 she served as the research coordinator at the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. She joined the Einstein Forum in 2018 and became its deputy director in 2024.

Homepage: franziskabomski.de

Dominic Bonfiglio studied philosophy and art history at the Johns Hopkins University and at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he received the master's thesis prize of the Carl-und-Max-Schneider-Stiftung. In addition to his work at the Einstein Forum, he translates books into English, most recently Jan Philipp Reemtsma's Trust and Violence (2012).

Irina Dumitrescu studied English and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto before writing her PhD at Yale on the role of suffering in early medieval education. She taught at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, before an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship brought her to the Free University Berlin. She then moved to the University of Bonn, where she led the section for English Medieval Studies. Her research interests include the history of rhetoric and education, short literary forms, women’s power, contemporary medievalism, failure and imperfection, performance and celebrity studies, food history, multilingualism, and migration.

She is the author of The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2018) and the editor or co-editor of Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (2016), The Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History (2019), Relations of Power: Women’s Networks in the Middle Ages (2021), Geschlecht macht Herrschaft – Interdisziplinäre Studien zu vormoderner Macht und Herrschaft (2021), as well as special issues of the journals New Literary History and Medieval Feminist Forum. Dumitrescu writes frequently for the public, with work published in the New York Review of Books, New York Times, London Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Times Literary Supplement, among many other publications. She has also developed and co-hosted several podcast series for the LRB. Her creative work has been reprinted in Best American Essays 2016, Best Food Writing 2017, Wine Reads: A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing, and Best Canadian Poetry 2026. Dumitrescu joined the Einstein Forum in 2026.

Website Irina Dumitrescu

Born 1953. He is researcher at the Einstein Forum since 1995. Matthias Kross studied history, political science, and philosophy in Marburg, Bremen, and Berlin. He then worked as a high school professor and as a freelancing journalist, translator and essayist. In 1993, he received his doctorate at the Free University of Berlin with a dissertation on Klarheit als Selbstzweck. Ludwig Wittgenstein über Philosophie, Religion, Ethik und Gewißheit. He is board member of the literaturWERKstatt (Berlin) and Councilor of the Institut für Kulturforschung Heidelberg, and Councillor of The Tagore Einstein Council at the Visvra Bharati University, (Santiniketan/Bengal, India). He is teaching at the University of Potsdam (Germany). His research interests focus on the philosophy of logic and language and on the cultural and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th century. He has written extensively on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Recent publications: (editor): „Ein Netz von Normen“. Ludwig Wittgenstein und die Mathematik (2007); (with G. Abel und M. Nedo): Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ingenieur – Philosoph – Künstler (2007); (with Susan Neiman): Zum Glück (2004); (with U. Arnswald and J. Kertscher): Wittgenstein und die Metapher (2003); (with H. J. Schneider): Mit Sprache spielen: Die Ordnungen und das Offene nach Wittgenstein (1999). Since 2006, he is series-editor of Wittgensteiniana.