Franz Mehring (Radboud University Nijmegen): TRANSNATIONAL SILHOUETTES…

Frank Mehring is professor of American Literature at Raboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He teaches 20th-century visual culture, theories of popular culture, ethnic modernism, and processes of cultural translation in transatlantic contexts. He recently received the biennial EAAS Rob Kroes Award for his monograph The Democratic Gap as the best book manuscript in Europe on American Studies. This monograph explores patterns of dissent of immigrants in pursuit of the promise of American democracy. He is the author of Sphere Melodies, published in 2003, which examines the intermediary work of the avant-garde artists Charles Ives and John Cage. In 2004, he also published a biography on the German-American freedom fighter Charles Follen (2004) and edited his writings (Between Nativists and Foreigners, appearing in 2007). With Winfried Fluck and Stefan L. Brandt he edited Transcultural Spaces: Challenges of Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment in the New Millennium, which appeared in 2010. 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) and a Fulbright American Studies Fellowship to the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University (2004). In 2008 and 2009, he was a fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 2011, he organized and moderated the first international symposium on the German-American artist Winold Reiss at the Freie Universität Berlin (www.fu-berlin.de/winold-reiss).