Keynote speaker:

Frank Trommler, Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Pennsylvania, has published extensively on German-American cultural relations and German immigration to the United States. His most recent book, Kulturmacht ohne Kompass: Deutsche auswärtige Kulturbeziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Cultural Power without a Compass: German Cultural Relations in the Twentieth Century; Böhlau Verlag, 2014), examines the importance of cultural diplomacy in Germany’s relations with France, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, Italy, and Poland during the 1900s.

Panelists and Moderators

Kirsten “Kit” Belgum is Associate Professor of German at the University of Texas at Austin. She works on Nineteenth-Century German Studies, Popular Culture, Print Culture, Nationalism, German Realism, and Travel literature. She is well known for her book Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853-1900 (Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1998).

Tobias Heinrich Albert Brinkmann is Malvin and Lea Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at the Pennsylvania State University. He has written extensively on Jewish immigration to the United States. His recent book, Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) is focused on a prominent American Jewish Reform temple that was established in 1861 by German-speaking Jewish immigrants.

Heike Bungert is Professor of American Studies at the University of Münster. She has written extensively on German America. Among her many publications is Wisconsin German Land and Life. Madison, WI: Max Kade Institute, 2006.

Kathleen Neils Conzen is Thomas E. Donnelley Professor Emerita of American History at The University of Chicago. She teaches social and political history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a special interest in issues of immigration, ethnicity, religion, western settlement, and urban development. She has written a great deal on Germans in the Midwest, particularly in Minnesota.

Alison Efford is Associate Professor of History at Marquette University. She is an historian of immigration and the nineteenth-century United States. Her first book, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era (Cambridge University Press, 2013), explored how German Americans contributed to the rise and fall of white commitment to black rights.

Jeannette Gabriel is a PhD candidate in the University of Iowa Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education. Her dissertation is I Can’t See Race: Examining History Teachers’ Use of Images through the Teaching American History (TAH) Grant to Study African-American History. As curator of the Jewish Women in Iowa Project, part of the Iowa Women’s Archives, she has traveled throughout Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska to preserve and protect family collections.

Link: “We Did So Much Beyond the Home”: Jeannette Gabriel Talks about the Jewish Women in Iowa Project

Walter D. Kamphoefner is Professor of History at Texas A&M University. He teaches immigration, urbanization, and quantitative methods. He has published widely in the field of immigration and ethnicity, and he is well known for his books on German immigration to the US and Germans in the American Civil War.

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is a PhD student in Musicology at the University of Iowa and a staff member at the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights. Kelsey’s current research focuses on the musical lives of German POWs in America during WWII, and the U.S. military’s POW reeducation program.

Bradley Naranch is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Montana. He has written on German colonialism and Germans abroad in a variety of contexts, particularly in the United States. He is the author of the standard essay on the Auslandsdeutsche (Germans abroad).

Jana Weiß is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Münster. She has written a great deal on Germans in America and is currently completing a book on German beer production in the Midwest.

Bethany Wiggin is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has focused on Germans in the United States during the colonial era, particularly in Pennsylvania. She is the author of Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680-1730 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 2011).

Andrew Zimmerman is Professor of History at George Washington University. Among his many publications is Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). He is currently working on a series of projects tying together world revolutionary rhetorics, Marxism and the American Civil War.