Frank MEHRING

Radboud Universiteit

Full Professor

Erasmusplein 1
6525 HT Nijmegen

The Netherlands

Bio sketch:

Frank Mehring is professor of American studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture and music, theories of popular culture, transnational modernism, and processes of cultural translation between European and American contexts. In 2012, he received the European Association for American Studies’ biennial Rob Kroes Award, which recognizes the best book-length manuscript in Europe in American studies, for his monograph The Democratic Gap (Winter, 2014). Frank Mehring is the author of Sphere Melodies (2003) about the transcendentalist roots of the composers Charles Ives and John Cage. In 2004, he published a biography on the German-American freedom fighter Charles Follen (2004) and edited his writings under the title Between Natives and Foreigners (2007). With Stefan L. Brandt and Winfried Fluck, he edited a volume on Transcultural Spaces (2010). His recent research projects focused on The Soundtrack of Liberation (2015) and the aesthetic connections between the visual Harlem Renaissance and Vogue Mexico in The Mexico Diary (2016).

Frank Mehring was a member of the German National Merit Foundation, he was awarded a DAAD stipend at the music department of Harvard University (1997-98) and a Fulbright American Studies Fellowship to the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University (2004-2005). Mehring 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 seminars at the Berlin European Studies Program (FU-BEST), the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, and as an Erasmus Exchange Professor at the Karl-Franzens-University Graz. He co-curated exhibitions on Winold Reiss, the Marshall Plan, and Liberation Songs in New York, Nijmegen and The Hague.