Lars Schmeink is currently Research Fellow at the Europa-Universität Flensburg and has just returned from a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Leeds. In 2010, he inaugurated the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung and served as President of the Board for 10 years. He has been involved in research on the fantastic, science fiction, and popular culture in research projects like „FutureWork“ or the „World Hobbit Project“ and has written extensively on these topics. He is the author of Biopunk Dystopias (Liverpool UP, 2016) and the co-editor of Cyberpunk and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2018), The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (2020), Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (Routledge, 2022) and New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction (Palgrave, 2022). His current research, a book on the German movement of the „Progressive Fantastic“ will be published in 2023 by Lever Press, University of Michigan.