Faculty
MAS Lecturers in 2011/12
- Hasan Adwan, M.A.
- Prof. Dr. Manfred Berg
- Dr. Christian Broecking
- Dr. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung
- Prof. Dr. Ulrike Gerhard
- Dr. Wilfried Mausbach
- Anja Milde, M.A.
- Prof. Dr. Dietmar Schloss
- Dr. Anja Schüler
- Daniel Silliman, M.A.
- Prof. Dr. Jan Stievermann
- PD Dr. Martin Thunert
Hasan Adwan, M.A.
TA Political Science
hadwan@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 6221 / 54 3710
Office hours: Thursdays, 2 - 4 p.m.
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Haupstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 306
Hasan Adwan was born in Gaza City, Palestine, in 1985. He received the International Baccalaureate in Norway at the Red Cross Nordic United World College in 2004. In 2005, he was awarded the Davis-UWC scholarship to study in the U.S. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Westminster College with a double major in political science, with emphasis on political philosophy and American history. He wrote a bachelor thesis entitled “The Evolution of Basque Nationalism.” After completing his bachelor studies he moved to Germany where he attended the HCA and earned a master’s degree. His master thesis dealt with U.S. Foreign Aid to the Palestinian Authority. After completing his master’s degree, Hasan joined the HCA’s Ph.D. program. He is interested in American history, constitutional law, and American foreign policy.
Prof. Dr. Manfred Berg
History
manfred.berg@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 6221 54 2276
Office hours: Tuesdays, 11 am - 1 pm
History Department
Grabengasse 3-5
69117 Heidelberg
Room 041
Manfred Berg is the Curt Engelhorn Professor of American History at the University of Heidelberg and a specialist in the history of the African American civil rights movement. His book The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration was published in 2005 by the University Press of Florida. In 2006 Manfred Berg received the David Thelen Award of the Organization of American Historians for his essay “Civil Rights and Liberal Anticommunism: The NAACP during the Early Cold War,” which was published in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of American History. In addition, Professor Berg has published ten more monographs and edited volumes and over forty scholarly articles in both English and German on various aspects of American and German history. Before he was appointed professor of American History at Heidelberg, he taught at the Free University of Berlin and was a research fellow (1992-1997) at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., among other positions. In 2009 he served as the Lewis P. Jones Professor of History at Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Dr. Christian Broecking
Musicology
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 206
Christian Broecking is a sociologist and musicologist, who graduated with an Dipl.-Soz. in sociology from the Free University in Berlin. He received his Dr. phil. from the Technische Universität Berlin (TUB) with a thesis titled “Der Marsalis-Komplex. Studien zur gesellschaftlichen Relevanz des afroamerikanischen Jazz zwischen 1992 und 2007,” which was published subsequently by TUB (Digitales Repositorium) and Broecking Verlag in 2011. Besides teaching at the HCA, Broecking is a lecturer at the Winterthurer Institut für aktuelle Musik, TUB and Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. He has written about American culture and Afro-American jazz, including articles for Reclams Jazzlexikon. His books Der Marsalis-Faktor (1995), Respekt (2004), Black Codes (2005) and Jeder Ton eine Rettungsstation (2007) dealt with problems of racism, music and transculturality. His most recent books are Herbie Hancock – Interviews (2010), Ornette Coleman – Klang der Freiheit (2010) and Sonny Rollins – Improvisation und Protest (2010). Broecking served as the founding program director for Berlin jazz radio from 1994 to 1998. His published articles on music and cultural studies have appeared in scholarly journals and edited volumes, he holds columns in several daily newspapers in Germany and serves as a staff writer for the online music section of Die Zeit. He is editing and producing radio features on jazz and Afro-American culture for German public radio since 1995.
Dr. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung
Methodology
dfischerhornung@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 6221 54 2851
Office hours: Thursdays, 4 - 5 pm, Fridays 12 am - 1 pm
English Department
Kettengasse 12
69117 Heidelberg
Room 331
Dorothea Fischer-Hornung is Senior Lecturer in the English Department of Heidelberg University. Her research focuses on ethnic literatures and film in English as well as performance theories and practices. She has developed, taught, and published on international e-learning cooperations with universities in numerous countries. She is founding co-editor of the journal Atlantic Studies and president of MESEA, Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas.
Prof. Dr. Ulrike Gerhard
Geography
ulrike.gerhard@geog.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 6221 / 54 5542
Office hours: TBA
Geographisches Institut
Berliner Straße 48
69120 Heidelberg
Ulrike Gerhard is professor for Human Geography of North America at the Geography Department. Previously she has taught North American Studies as well as Urban Geography at the University of Wuerzburg (2001-10), Munich (2005-06) and also Heidelberg (2008-09). She has been a geography student at Marburg as well as Waterloo, Canada and received her PhD in 1998 from Marburg University, doing research on urban consumer landscapes in Canada and Germany. Since then she has studied the political geography of US American cities in the US (see for example a book titled “Global City Washington, D.C. – eine politische Stadtgeographie”), spending several months in Washington, D.C. (e.g., at the German Historical Institute) and other North American cities. Her most recent research topics deal with urban inequality in the Americas, the discursive structuring of cities as well as consumerism in North American and European cities.
Dr. Wilfried Mausbach
Interdisciplinary Colloquium 
wmausbach@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49-6221 54 3712
Office hours: Mondays, 3 - 4 pm
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 206
Wilfried Mausbach received his Ph.D. from the University of Cologne where he studied History, Political Science and Philosophy. He has been a reaseach fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., and has held assistant professorships in history at both the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University Berlin and at Heidelberg University, where he has also been a Volkswagen Foundation fellow. His major research interests are in transnational and intercultural history with a focus on German-American relations during the twentieth century. He is the author of Zwischen Morgenthau und Marshall: Das wirtschaftspolitische Deutschlandkonzept der USA 1944-1947 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1996), and co-editor of America, the Vietnam War, and the World. Comparative and International Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and of Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010). Since 2005 he is the Executive Director of the HCA.
Anja Milde, M.A.
TA History
amilde@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49-6221 / 54 3882
Office hours: Tuesdays, 10 a.m. - 12 p.m.
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 311
Anja Milde received her B.A. in Philology and Communication Science in 2003 from the University of Erfurt. Since fall 2003, she has been a student at Heidelberg University, majoring in history and art history. Before joining the HCA‘s Master program in 2007, she spent a year on a Fulbright scholarship at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where she majored in American Studies and after which she interned at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. During her studies, she specialized in American history, politics and constitutional law with a particular focus on social movements in the U.S. She is currently working on her Ph.D. thesis on the linkages between the civil and gay rights movements. In 2009-10, Anja spent seven months in the U.S. researching her dissertation and conducting a series of interviews with leading figures of both movements, politicians, and intellectuals. Since fall 2007, Anja Milde has been working at the HCA as a public relations assistant and tutor for American history, In March 2010, she took on the position of Spring Academy coordinator
Prof. Dr. Dietmar Schloss
American Literature
dietmar.schloss@urz.uni-heidelberg.de
Tel: +49 6221 54-2834
Office Hours: TBA
English Department
Kettengasse 12
69117 Heidelberg
Room 314
Prof. Dietmar Schloss teaches American literature and culture at the English Department of the University of Heidelberg. He holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University (Evanston, IL.) and a postdoctoral degree (Habilitation) from the University of Heidelberg. As a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, he was a visiting scholar at the English and History Departments at Harvard University. He has published widely in the fields of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture; his book The Virtuous Republic (2003) examines the political visions of American writers during the founding period of the United States. In 2009 he has published a volume of conference proceedings entitled Civilizing America: Manners and Civility in American Literature and Culture as well as collection of critical essays on the contemporary American novel. In his new project, entitled “Spaces of Decivilization”, he explores the phenomenon of violence in American literature and culture from the vantage point of Norbert Elias’s sociological theory.
Dr. Anja Schüler
Methodology
aschueler@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49-6221 54 3879
Office hours: Thursdays, 1 - 2 pm
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 308
Anja Schüler studied History, English and Journalism at the University of Münster, the University of Georgia in Athens, and the Free University Berlin, where she earned an M.A. She was a DAAD Fellow at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and lived in Washington, D.C., for several years. She received her Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin in 2000 with a dissertation on „Women’s Movements and Social Reform: Jane Addams, Alice Salomon, and the Transatlantic Dialogue, 1889-1933.“ Her research interests include German and American Social History, Gender History, and Transatlantic History. From 2006 to 2010, Schüler taught at the University of Education in Heidelberg. At the HCA, she teaches Academic Writing and is also responsible for Public Relations and the coordination of the Baden-Württemberg Seminar.
Daniel Silliman, M.A.
Methodology
dsilliman@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 6221 / 54 3881
Office hours: TBA
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 310
Daniel Silliman is an instructor in American Religion at the University of Heidelberg. He studied philosophy at Hillsdale College in Michigan, where he completed two B.A. thesis projects, one on the possibility of a linguistic solution to the mind-body problem, and another on “Death of God” theology. He earned an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Tübingen, writing a master’s thesis entitled, “Sacred Signs in a Secular Sky: The Problem of Pluralism in Apocalyptic Evangelical Fiction.” He is building on that project for his Ph.D., researching how pluralism functions in contemporary evangelical faith fiction. He also worked for several years as a journalist, reporting on crime for a daily newspaper south of Atlanta, Georgia.
Prof. Dr. Jan Stievermann
Theology/Religious Studies
jstievermann@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 6221 54 3881
Office hours: Tuesdays, 11 - 12 am
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 310
Jan Stievermann is Professor of the History of Christianity in North America at the University of Heidelberg. He has written on a broad range of topics in the fields of American religious history and American literature, including articles for Early American Literature and William and Mary Quarterly. His book Der Sündenfall der Nachahmung: Zum Problem der Mittelbarkeit im Werk Ralph Waldo Emersons (Schöningh, 2007; The Original Fall of Imitation: The Problem of Mediacy in the Works of R.W.E.) is a comprehensive study of the co-evolution of Emerson’s religious and aesthetic thought. Together with Reiner Smolinski, he published Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana–America’s First Bible Commentary (Mohr Siebeck & Baker Academic, 2010). He is currently at work on a book, tentatively titled “The Ethnic Fantastic,” that examines issues of spirituality in contemporary ethnic minority literatures. Concurrently, he leads a DFG-funded team transcribing and editing vol. 5 of Cotton Mather’s hitherto unpublished Biblia Americana, the first comprehensive Bible commentary produced in British North America. For the Biblia-project as a whole (10 vols.) he also serves as the executive editor.
PD Dr. Martin Thunert
Political Science
mthunert@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 6221 54 3877
Office hours: Mondays, 2:30 - 4 pm
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 306
Martin Thunert joined the HCA as research lecturer in political science in September 2007. He is a graduate of Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University Frankfurt, holds a doctoral degree (Dr. phil) from the University of Augsburg and received his habilitation in Political Science from the University of Hamburg, where he was an assistant professor. Martin Thunert was an exchange student at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and did graduate work at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ont. and at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. He has held appointments in political studies at several German universities and spent four years (2002-2006) as Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a Kennedy- Fellow at the Harvard Center for European Studies and has gained practical experience as staff assistant at the U.S. Senate (Labor, Education and Health Committee).
