Faculty
MAS Lecturers in 2012/13
Hasan Adwan, M.A.
TA Political Science
hadwan@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 6221 / 54 3710
Office hours: Thursdays, 2 - 4 p.m.
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Haupstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 306
Hasan Adwan was born in Gaza City, Palestine, in 1985. He received the International Baccalaureate in Norway at the Red Cross Nordic United World College in 2004. In 2005, he was awarded the Davis-UWC scholarship to study in the U.S. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Westminster College with a double major in political science, with emphasis on political philosophy and American history. He wrote a bachelor thesis entitled “The Evolution of Basque Nationalism.” After completing his bachelor studies he moved to Germany where he attended the HCA and earned a master’s degree. His master thesis dealt with U.S. Foreign Aid to the Palestinian Authority. After completing his master’s degree, Hasan joined the HCA’s Ph.D. program. He is interested in American history, constitutional law, and American foreign policy.
Millie Baker
Presentation and Media Skills
milliebaker@web.de
Tel: +49 (0)6221-54 37 10
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Curt und Heidemarie Engelhorn Palais
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Millie Baker studied English and German philology and received her Master of Arts degree from the University of Heidelberg. Originally from London, she has been working in Germany since 1999 as a trainer for academic and business English, translator, and workshop facilitator for communication skills. Millie creates and carries out interactive workshops for researchers and doctoral candidates across the disciplines, combining academic communication skills with the English language to create specialized courses in presenting, writing and networking. Millie is co-author of “Schlüsselkompetenzen Handbuch für Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften” (Key Competencies Handbook for Humanities and Cultural Studies). Her courses are currently run at the German Cancer Research Centre, the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, and in various departments at the Universities of Berlin, Frankfurt, Konstanz, Heidelberg, and Vienna.
Prof. Dr. Manfred Berg
History
manfred.berg@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 6221 54 2276
Office hours: Tuesdays, 11 am - 1 pm
History Department
Grabengasse 3-5
69117 Heidelberg
Room 041
Manfred Berg is the Curt Engelhorn Professor of American History at the University of Heidelberg and a specialist in the history of the African American civil rights movement. His book The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration was published in 2005 by the University Press of Florida. In 2006 Manfred Berg received the David Thelen Award of the Organization of American Historians for his essay “Civil Rights and Liberal Anticommunism: The NAACP during the Early Cold War,” which was published in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of American History. In addition, Professor Berg has published ten more monographs and edited volumes and over forty scholarly articles in both English and German on various aspects of American and German history. Before he was appointed professor of American History at Heidelberg, he taught at the Free University of Berlin and was a research fellow (1992-1997) at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., among other positions. In 2009 he served as the Lewis P. Jones Professor of History at Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Prof. Dr. Ulrike Gerhard
Geography
ulrike.gerhard@geog.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 6221 / 54 5542
Office hours: TBA
Geographisches Institut
Berliner Straße 48
69120 Heidelberg
Ulrike Gerhard is professor for Human Geography of North America at the Geography Department. Previously she has taught North American Studies as well as Urban Geography at the University of Wuerzburg (2001-10), Munich (2005-06) and also Heidelberg (2008-09). She has been a geography student at Marburg as well as Waterloo, Canada and received her PhD in 1998 from Marburg University, doing research on urban consumer landscapes in Canada and Germany. Since then she has studied the political geography of US American cities in the US (see for example a book titled “Global City Washington, D.C. – eine politische Stadtgeographie”), spending several months in Washington, D.C. (e.g., at the German Historical Institute) and other North American cities. Her most recent research topics deal with urban inequality in the Americas, the discursive structuring of cities as well as consumerism in North American and European cities.
Martin Holler
TA Geography
martin-holler@geog.uni-heidelberg.de
+ 49 6221 / 54 3710
Office hours: TBA
Geographisches Institut
Berliner Straße 48
69120 Heidelberg
Martin Holler was born in Mannheim, Germany in 1986. He received his general qualification for university entrance at the Carl-Benz-Gymnasium Ladenburg in 2005. After his civilian service at Caritas Mannheim he enrolled at Heidelberg University in 2006. His major subject was Geography; his minor subjects were Cultural Anthropology and Urban Planning. During the academic year of 2009/2010 Martin was part of the Baden-Württemberg Exchange Program and was a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His diploma thesis was entitled “Urbane Ungleichheit in Stockton, California – Eine qualitative Analyse zur Wahrnehmung, Erfahrung und Sichtbarkeit”. Martin is interested in American cities, social geography and urban development.
Dr. Wilfried Mausbach
Interdisciplinary Colloquium 
wmausbach@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49-6221 54 3712
Office hours: Mondays, 3 - 4 pm
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 206
Wilfried Mausbach received his Ph.D. from the University of Cologne where he studied History, Political Science and Philosophy. He has been a reaseach fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., and has held assistant professorships in history at both the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University Berlin and at Heidelberg University, where he has also been a Volkswagen Foundation fellow. His major research interests are in transnational and intercultural history with a focus on German-American relations during the twentieth century. He is the author of Zwischen Morgenthau und Marshall: Das wirtschaftspolitische Deutschlandkonzept der USA 1944-1947 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1996), and co-editor of America, the Vietnam War, and the World. Comparative and International Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and of Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010). Since 2005 he is the Executive Director of the HCA.
Hannes Nagl, M.A.
Methodology
hnagl@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 (0)6221-54 38 82
Office hours: TBA
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 311
Hannes Nagl studied English and American literature and political science at Heidelberg University. After graduating in 2009, he joined the HCA’s Ph.D. program working on a thesis on “Figurations of Violence: Contemporary American Fiction and the Sociology of Modernization.” From August 2010 to July 2011 he was a research assistant at the English Department of Heidelberg University as part of the research project “Violence and the Hidden Constraints of Democracy: A New Civilization Studies Approach to American Literature and Culture.” At the HCA he teaches American literature and is responsible for the institute’s website.
Anthony Santoro, Ph.D.
TA History
ams2fx@gmail.com
+ 49 6221 / 54 3710
Office hours: TBA
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Anthony Santoro graduated from the University of Virginia in 1999 with a B.A. in English and History. After spending a year in Iceland and several more working in both the private and non-profit sectors, he moved to Heidelberg to join the first MAS program. After completing the MAS, Anthony began his doctoral work at the HCA under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Manfred Berg. The author of several scholarly articles and essays, including “The Prophet in His Own Words: Nat Turner’s Biblical Construction,” an article adapted from his MAS thesis that was published in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography in 2008, Anthony has published and taught on First, Sixth and Eighth Amendment case law; the links between sports and religion in the U.S.; and the American death penalty. His first book is Exile and Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourse on the Death Penalty (Northeastern University Press, Spring 2013).
Styles Sass, M.A.
TA Literature
ssass@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+ 49 6221 / 54 3710
Office hours: TBA
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Styles Sass received his bachelor's degree in English from the University of Iowa. After teaching in the Basque country of Northern Spain, he moved to Germany, where he was awarded several writing fellowships and published a collection of poetry and prose pieces titled More Than These Few Days. For his master's degree in American Studies at Heidelberg University, he wrote on the intersection of literature and politics in presidential campaign narratives. He lives in Stuttgart where he works as a writer, editor, and teacher.
Prof. Dr. Dietmar Schloss
American Literature
dietmar.schloss@urz.uni-heidelberg.de
Tel: +49 6221 54-2834
Office Hours: TBA
English Department
Kettengasse 12
69117 Heidelberg
Room 314
Prof. Dietmar Schloss teaches American literature and culture at the English Department of the University of Heidelberg. He holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University (Evanston, IL.) and a postdoctoral degree (Habilitation) from the University of Heidelberg. As a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, he was a visiting scholar at the English and History Departments at Harvard University. He has published widely in the fields of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture; his book The Virtuous Republic (2003) examines the political visions of American writers during the founding period of the United States. In 2009 he has published a volume of conference proceedings entitled Civilizing America: Manners and Civility in American Literature and Culture as well as collection of critical essays on the contemporary American novel. In his new project, entitled “Spaces of Decivilization”, he explores the phenomenon of violence in American literature and culture from the vantage point of Norbert Elias’s sociological theory.
Dr. Anja Schüler
Methodology
aschueler@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49-6221 54 3879
Office hours: Thursdays, 1 - 2 pm
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 308
Anja Schüler studied History, English and Journalism at the University of Münster, the University of Georgia in Athens, and the Free University Berlin, where she earned an M.A. She was a DAAD Fellow at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and lived in Washington, D.C., for several years. She received her Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin in 2000 with a dissertation on „Women’s Movements and Social Reform: Jane Addams, Alice Salomon, and the Transatlantic Dialogue, 1889-1933.“ Her research interests include German and American Social History, Gender History, and Transatlantic History. From 2006 to 2010, Schüler taught at the University of Education in Heidelberg. At the HCA, she teaches Academic Writing and is also responsible for Public Relations and the coordination of the Baden-Württemberg Seminar.
Daniel Silliman, M.A.
Methodology
dsilliman@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 6221 / 54 3881
Office hours: TBA
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 310
Daniel Silliman is an instructor in American Religion at the University of Heidelberg. He studied philosophy at Hillsdale College in Michigan, where he completed two B.A. thesis projects, one on the possibility of a linguistic solution to the mind-body problem, and another on “Death of God” theology. He earned an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Tübingen, writing a master’s thesis entitled, “Sacred Signs in a Secular Sky: The Problem of Pluralism in Apocalyptic Evangelical Fiction.” He is building on that project for his Ph.D., researching how pluralism functions in contemporary evangelical faith fiction. He also worked for several years as a journalist, reporting on crime for a daily newspaper south of Atlanta, Georgia.
Prof. Dr. Jan Stievermann
Theology/Religious Studies
jstievermann@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 6221 54 3881
Office hours: Tuesdays, 11 - 12 am
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 310
Jan Stievermann is Professor of the History of Christianity in North America at the University of Heidelberg. He has written on a broad range of topics in the fields of American religious history and American literature, including articles for Early American Literature and William and Mary Quarterly. His book Der Sündenfall der Nachahmung: Zum Problem der Mittelbarkeit im Werk Ralph Waldo Emersons (Schöningh, 2007; The Original Fall of Imitation: The Problem of Mediacy in the Works of R.W.E.) is a comprehensive study of the co-evolution of Emerson’s religious and aesthetic thought. Together with Reiner Smolinski, he published Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana–America’s First Bible Commentary (Mohr Siebeck & Baker Academic, 2010). He is currently at work on a book, tentatively titled “The Ethnic Fantastic,” that examines issues of spirituality in contemporary ethnic minority literatures. Concurrently, he leads a DFG-funded team transcribing and editing vol. 5 of Cotton Mather’s hitherto unpublished Biblia Americana, the first comprehensive Bible commentary produced in British North America. For the Biblia-project as a whole (10 vols.) he also serves as the executive editor.
PD Dr. Martin Thunert
Political Science
mthunert@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
+49 6221 54 3877
Office hours: Mondays, 2:30 - 4 pm
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Room 306
Martin Thunert joined the HCA as research lecturer in political science in September 2007. He is a graduate of Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University Frankfurt, holds a doctoral degree (Dr. phil) from the University of Augsburg and received his habilitation in Political Science from the University of Hamburg, where he was an assistant professor. Martin Thunert was an exchange student at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and did graduate work at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ont. and at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. He has held appointments in political studies at several German universities and spent four years (2002-2006) as Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a Kennedy- Fellow at the Harvard Center for European Studies and has gained practical experience as staff assistant at the U.S. Senate (Labor, Education and Health Committee).
Cynthia Wilke, J.D.
Law
cynthiawilke@t-online.de
+ 49 6221 / 54 3877
Office hours: TBA
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg
Cynthia Wilke lectures on the United States legal system at the Law School of the University of Heidelberg and the EBS University (i.Gr.) for Business and Law in Wiesbaden. She was born and raised near Chicago, Illinois. She graduated from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois with a degree in Modern Languages and received her J.D. degree from Northwestern University School of Law. She practiced law in Chicago and worked as a civilian attorney with the United States Army in Frankfurt in the area of procurement law. She has lived and studied in Barcelona, Spain and Heidelberg, Germany.
