Faculty
Prof. Dr. Manfred Berg
History
manfred.berg@uni-hd.de
Tel.: + 49 (0)6221-54 24 77
History Department
Grabengasse 3-5
69047 Heidelberg
Room: 042
Professor Manfred Berg studied history, political science, philosophy, and public law in Heidelberg. From 1989 until 1992 he was assistant professor at the History Department of the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies of the Free University of Berlin. He spent several years in Washington D.C. as research fellow and temporary Deputy Director of the German Historical Institute. From 2003 to 2005 he was Executive Director of the Center for U.S. Studies at the Leucorea Foundation in Wittenberg. Since April 2005 he holds the Curt Engelhorn Chair in American History.
Prof. Dr. Ulrike Gerhard
Geography
ulrike.gerhard@geog.uni-heidelberg.de
Tel.: +49 (0)6221-54 55 42
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.
Prof. Dr. Günter Leypoldt
Literature/Cultural Studies 
English Department
Kettengasse 12
69117 Heidelberg
Günter Leypoldt is professor of American Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Modern Languages. Previously he taught American studies at the universities of Tübingen (2001-7), Maryland, College Park (2003), and Mainz (2007-2009), with degrees in American, British, and German literatures from Cape Town (BA) and Tübingen (doctorate and habilitation). He has published essays on literary transcendentalism, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics, twentieth-century literary and cultural theory, and a monograph on contemporary fiction, Casual Silences: The Poetics of Minimal Realism (Trier, 2001). His most recent study deals with nineteenth-century US literary culture and its modernist reconstruction, Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective (Edinburgh UP, 2009). His present research interests include transatlantic romanticism and modernism, American pragmatism, transculturality, the borders between aesthetic and religious experience, and the sociology of knowledge formation.
Prof. Dr. Dietmar Schloss
Literature/Cultural Studies 
dietmar.schloss@urz.uni-heidelberg.de
Tel.: +49 (0)6221-54 28 34
English Department
Kettengasse 12
69117 Heidelberg
Prof. Dr. Dietmar Schloss teaches American literature and culture at the English Department of the University of Heidelberg. He holds degrees in English and German Philology from the University of Heidelberg (Habilitation) and Northwestern University, Evanston (M.A., Ph.D.). 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- and nineteenth-century literature and culture; his most recent book, The Virtuous Republic (2003), examines the political visions of American writers during the Founding Period of the United States. Presently he is working on a book on the contemporary US-American novel tentatively entitled “American Paradise: Cultural Criticism in the Age of Postmodernity and Postindustrialism”. He is also trying to set up a new interdisciplinary group research project investigating the role of intellectuals and intellectual cultures in American society.
Prof. Dr. Jan Stievermann
American Religious History
+49 6221 54 3880
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
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
Tel.: +49 (0)6221-54 38 77
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Curt und Heidemarie Engelhorn Palais
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Martin Thunert is a senior research associate at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies and project coordinator of the Bertelsmann Reform Index of OECD Countries, 2005-2006. Between 2002 and 2005, he was Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds degrees in Political Science from the University of Tübingen (B.A. equivalent) and the universities of Frankfurt (M.A.), Augsburg (Dr. phil) and Hamburg (post-doc). He also conducted graduate studies at Queen’s University and McGill University as well as research visits at the Harvard Center for European Studies and University of Southampton (UK). His practical experience includes working as a staff assistant at the U.S. Senate (Labor, Education and Health Committee).
Dr. Anja Schüler
Academic Writing
aschueler@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
Tel: +49 (0)6221-54 38 79
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Curt und Heidemarie Engelhorn Palais
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Anja Schüler is a historian who graduated with an M.A. in Modern History from the John F. Kennedy-Institute of the Free University in Berlin. A former highschool exchange student at Athens, Georgia, Anja Schüler returned to the U.S. to do graduate work in History at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St.Paul on a DAAD scholarship and received her Dr. phil. in History from the Free University of Berlin with a thesis titled “Frauenbewegung und soziale Reform. Jane Addams und Alice Salomon im transatlantischen Dialog, 1889-1933,” which was published subsequently by Franz Steiner Verlag in 2004. Besides teaching at the HCA, Anja Schüler is also an adjunct lecturer at the Heidelberg University of Education.
Millie Baker
Presentation and Media Skills
milliebaker@web.de
Tel: +49 (0)6221-54 37 10
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Curt und Heidemarie Engelhorn Palais
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Millie Baker studied English and German philology and received her Master of Arts degree from the University of Heidelberg. Originally from London, she has been working in Germany since 1999 as a trainer for academic and business English, translator, and workshop facilitator for communication skills. Millie creates and carries out interactive workshops for researchers and doctoral candidates across the disciplines, combining academic communication skills with the English language to create specialized courses in presenting, writing and networking. Millie is co-author of “Schlüsselkompetenzen Handbuch für Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften” (Key Competencies Handbook for Humanities and Cultural Studies). Her courses are currently run at the German Cancer Research Centre, the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, and in various departments at the Universities of Berlin, Frankfurt, Konstanz, Heidelberg, and Vienna.
