Prof. F. Mehring (Frank)

Frank Mehring is a Professor of American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, and currently serves as the President of the Netherlands American Studies Association. His research and teaching focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture and music, theories of popular culture, transatlantic studies, and cultural translation processes between European and American contexts.

In 2012, Mehring received the biennial Rob Kroes Award from the European Association for American Studies for his monograph The Democratic Gap (Winter, 2014). He is also the author of Sphere Melodies (2003), which explores the transcendentalist influences on composers Charles Ives and John Cage, and a biography of the German-American freedom fighter Charles Follen (Charles Follen, 2004). His edition of Follen’s writings, Between Natives and Foreigners, followed in 2007.

Mehring’s recent research projects include The Transatlantic Soundtrack of Freedom (2025), Sound & Vision (2018), The Politics and Cultures of Liberation (2018), and a study on the artist Winold Reiss (2022).

A former fellow of the German National Merit Foundation, he was awarded a DAAD fellowship at Harvard University’s Music Department (1997–98) and a Fulbright American Studies Fellowship at Harvard’s Department of English and American Literature and Language (2004–05). After 2006, he served as an assistant and guest professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the 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.

Mehring has also taught at the Berlin European Studies Program (FU-BEST), the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, and as an Erasmus Exchange Professor at Karl-Franzens-University Graz. Beyond academia, he has co-curated exhibitions on Winold Reiss, the Marshall Plan, and Liberation Songs, showcased in New York, Nijmegen, and The Hague.