Prof. F. Mehring (Frank)
Professor - Department of Modern Languages and Cultures
Professor - Radboud Institute for Culture and History
Erasmusplein 1
6525 HT NIJMEGEN
Postbus 9103
6500 HD NIJMEGEN
My work offers an intermedial, place-based, and publicly engaged approach to transatlantic and sustainable American Studies. I examine how ideas, images, sounds, and memories circulate between Europe and North America and thereby gain new meanings through cultural exchange.
How are freedom, democracy, and belonging expressed through culture? My book "The Democratic Gap" explores this with a focus on patterns of how German immigrants responded to the discrepency between democratic ideals and racist realities. My work on Marshall Plan media, liberation narratives, and transatlantic memory likewise investigates how democratic values become visible, audible, and contested.
The medium of music is central to my research, teaching, and outreach activities. I use it as a key to understand how political communication, cultural memory, and collective identities are constructed. My work brings music into dialogue with literature, visual art, photography, film, performance, and environmental culture.
Research and teaching converge in my concepts of TOPO to "ground" transnational American Studies. E.g., in the internatinal RUDESA Spring Academy, students connect local work at museums, archives, landscapes, and sites of memory to global questions and challenges. Students thus becoming active researchers and cultural mediators.
TOPO (Theory, Organization, Performance, Outreach) informs my approach to sustainable American Studies connecting global environmental challenges with local observation, interpretation, and participation, asking: how can literature and the arts bridge the gap between knowledge and action.
As President of the Netherlands American Studies Association (NASA) and Regional Director of the German Atlantic Society (DAG), I foster dialogue among academic, cultural, and civic communities.