Ylva Kreye, M.A.

I received my B.A. in American Studies and History (2019) as well as my M.A. in American Studies (2022) from the JGU. During my studies, I participated in the department’s direct exchange and spent a year studying at Brock University (Ontario, Canada). Since 2020 I have worked as a tutor and research assistant for Prof. Dr. Axel Schäfer, focusing on U.S. and transnational history particularly in the 20th-century and supporting the SFB 1482 project “Migration and the American Social Welfare State.” This project explores how categories of human differentiation arise, change, and come into use in the interrelation of modern state-building and global flows of goods, people, and ideas.

In relation to this project, my master’s thesis traced the intellectual connections and activist network of Russian-Jewish immigrant, socialist and social reformer, and “father of Social Security” Isaac Max Rubinow across his published writings and archived correspondence at the beginning of the twentieth century. I am particularly interested in this period of late 19th- to early 20th-century transnational history and how state-building, social policy and reform, and an emerging consumer society conceptualized, shaped, and managed populations in mutually constitutive processes.