Taking its cue from contemporary western debates on presence in the social sciences and the humanities, this volume focuses on 'presence' both as everyday experience and as an experience of intense moments. It raises questions about diverse social configurations of presence as well as about the specific cultural repertoires which encode, articulate, and shape discourses of presence. The contributions take as a premise that phenomena of presence are connected to particular forms of knowledge. Especially tacit knowledge (pre)determines experiences of individual and collective presence and becomes tangible in moments of presence or presentification.

Markus Gottwald (Dr.) is lecturer in Sociology at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg. Kay Kirchmann (Prof. Dr.) teaches Media Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. Heike Paul (Prof. Dr.) is the chair holder of American studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and directs the Global Sentimentality Project. Research stays and visiting professorships have taken her to Cambridge (MA), Toronto, Hanover (NH), and Los Angeles, among other places. In 2018, she was recipient of the Leibniz Prize.