RUDESA Spring Academy 2026 of the MA in Transatlantic Studies explores “Freedom, Democratization and Democracy under Pressure”
In times of global uncertainty, when democratic institutions are increasingly challenged and the meaning of freedom is widely debated, the RUDESA Spring Academy 2026 brought together students from our American Studies programs at Radboud University and the University of Duisburg-Essen to explore the theme “Freedom, Democratization and Democracy under Pressure.” Following the program’s guiding principle of grounding, the academy combined theoretical reflection with archival research and site-based learning across the Netherlands and Germany.
The focus on location of university programs encourages students to connect abstract ideas with concrete places, historical sources, and lived experiences. Rather than discussing freedom and democracy only in seminar rooms, participants traced these concepts in local museums, archives, memorial sites, and urban spaces around campusses. Inspired by cultural memory theorist Jan Assmann’s insight that societies remember through institutions such as archives, monuments, and museums, the academy explored how political values are shaped through practices of remembrance.
The program in Nijmegen began at the Freedom Museum, where students examined how the liberation of the Netherlands during the Second World War is narrated from multiple perspectives. Exhibits on American and Canadian troops highlighted the military campaign, while Dutch voices revealed how liberation was experienced locally.
Discussions focused on the tension between national narratives and transnational memory, asking whose stories are preserved and how they are told.
From there, the group visited the Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery, where more than 2,600 Canadian soldiers are buried. Here, grounding meant focusing on individual biographies rather than abstract history. Students researched the lives of soldiers who paid the ultimate price for freedom, including Jewish, African American, and Indigenous servicemen whose stories are often absent from dominant liberation narratives. Standing among the graves, participants reflected on how memory culture can both include and exclude, and how democratic societies depend on the willingness to confront these complexities.
The following day, the academy turned to the city of Nijmegen, treating the urban landscape as a form of open-air archive. Through monuments, murals, sculptures, and landmarks such as the Oversteek Bridge, students traced how the story of liberation has been inscribed into public space. Working in small groups, they analyzed how commemorative sites, bridges, memorial plaques, and public artworks construct narratives of freedom that connect past and present. Their findings were presented in a session on trinational perspectives on freedom, comparing Dutch, German, and North American approaches to remembrance.
The second part of the academy took place in the German city of Essen, shifting the focus from liberation to democratization. In the city archive Essen, students worked with original documents to investigate how democratic culture was rebuilt in West Germany after 1945. Guided by archivists, they examined local newspapers and visual collections from the 1950s and early 1960s, tracing debates about political education, cultural exchange, and the role of the United States in shaping postwar democracy.
Particular attention was given to the former Amerika Haus Essen at Kennedy Square, once a central institution of transatlantic exchange. Through archival research, students reconstructed the building’s history—its exhibitions, library holdings, film programs, and public lectures—and explored how the Amerika Haus functioned as a space where freedom and democracy were promoted, discussed, and sometimes contested during the Cold War.
Throughout the week, the theme “Democracy under Pressure” remained central to the discussions. By comparing wartime liberation, postwar democratization, and contemporary debates about memory and identity, participants reflected on how fragile democratic values can be and how important it is to preserve the institutions that sustain them. Archives, museums, and public monuments emerged not as static repositories of the past, but as active spaces in which societies negotiate their understanding of freedom.
The results of the students’ research will be presented in a special exhibition in Essen and later this year at the conference of the Netherlands American Studies Association in Nijmegen (November 4–6, 2026), dedicated to the theme “American Protest Cultures.” In the spirit of grounding, the exhibition will bring together documents, images, and site-based analyses to show how the meaning of freedom changes across time, place, and perspective.
The organizers — Prof. Frank Mehring and Peter van der Heiden (Radboud University), Prof. Barbara Buchenau, and Prof. Florian Freitag (University of Duisburg-Essen) — would like to thank the Radboud Institute for Culture & History, the International Office of the Faculty of Arts, the American Studies Program, the Aurora Exchange Program, and the University of Duisburg-Essen for their generous support.
By linking theory, archives, and lived spaces, the RUDESA Spring Academy 2026 demonstrated that the study of freedom is never finished — and that democracy depends on the willingness to remember, to question, and to engage.