Professor of American Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen
Frank Mehring, professor of American Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. He teaches 20th and 21st century visual culture, music, theories of popular culture and transatlantic transfer. In 2012, he received the biennial EAAS Rob Kroes Award for his monograph The Democratic Gap (2014). He is the author of Sphere Melodies (Metzler: 2003), which traces the cultural flows between American transcendentalism and the work of the avant-garde composers Charles Ives and John Cage. In 2004, he published a biography on the German-American freedom fighter Charles Follen (Ferber: 2004) and edited his writings under the title Between Natives and Foreigners (Lang: 2007). He co-edited anthologies on recent developments in transnational American Studies including Transcultural Spaces: Challenges of Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment in the New Millennium (2010), The Soundtrack of Liberation (2015),The Mexico Diary: Winold Reiss between Vogue Mexico and Harlem Renaissance (2016), Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music (2017), Politics and Cultures of Liberation: Media, Memory, and Projections of Democracy (2018), The Black Diaspora and Germany. Deutschland und die Schwarze Diaspora (2018), Forging the American Century: World War II and the Transformation of US Internationalism (2019).
Frank Mehring has been a member of the German National Merit Foundation. He was awarded a DAAD stipend at the music department of Harvard University (1997-1998) and a Fulbright American Studies Fellowship to the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University (2004-2005). After 2006, he worked as an assistant and guest professor at the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies/Free University of Berlin. In 2008 and 2009, he was a fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. He offered courses on popular culture in Euro-American contexts to American undergraduate students in the Berlin European Studies Program (FU-BEST), the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, and as an Erasmus Exchange Professor at the Karl-Franzens-University Graz, the University of Fribourg and the University of Regensburg. He co-curated exhibitions on Winold Reiss, the Marshall Plan, and Liberation Songs in New York, Nijmegen and The Hague. His latest book The Multicultural Modernism of Winold Reiss (1886–1953) traces the role of art and design as an intercultural mediator in transatlantic modernism.
For more information: http://www.ru.nl/nas/who-what-where/staff/prof-dr-mehring/