Erica Carter is Professor of German at King’s College, London. She started her research career as a student at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, then moved from the centre to co-found a translation cooperative, Material Word.  Following a later stint as Director of Talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, she returned to academic life, and has since researched, published and taught widely on German cultural and film studies and cultural history. Her works include the topics gender and consumption (How German is She? 1997), German cinema (The German Cinema Book, 2002) and Third Reich film aesthetics (Dietrich’s Ghosts, 2004). Her current work is moving away from an exclusive focus on things German, and towards questions of transnationalism in cultural studies and cultural history. Her recent projects focus on European culture under fascist occupation, on German-speaking exile audiences in Britain and the Empire after 1933, and on the early film theory (Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, 2010). The volume was the subject of a conference organized in conjunction with the film journal Screen to mark their 50th anniversary in 2009, and was launched with an exhibition on Balázs at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in 2010. Since September 2010, she has been working on a new project on colonial melodrama that uses work on the melodramatic sensibility to explore the cultural experience of German-speaking émigré women in the British colonial territories after the Second World War.