Prof. Dr. Axel Schäfer
Univ-Prof. Dr., Chair of American History
Current Research
My current research project examines the role immigration policies and discourses have played in the formation of modern welfare states. In this context I also explore the coalescence of art, design, technology, social reform, and radical politics in areas such as urban planning, social housing, and the cooperative movement in the United States, Britain, and Germany in the decade after World War I. Moreover, I’m working on various studies that explore the international engagement of American evangelicals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and review the binaries of isolationism/internationalism and realism/idealism that are often ill-suited to describe the range of U.S. foreign policy positions in the period after World War II.
A few years ago I helped set up a new organization of historians of the twentieth-century US (HOTCUS). I’m also active in international professional bodies, including the Membership Committee of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the Council of the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era (SHGAPE).
Teaching
My main teaching fields are:
- Twentieth Century U.S. Political and Cultural History
- Nineteenth and Twentieth Century U.S. Intellectual History
- Religion and Politics in the United States
- History of the American West
- Cultural History of U.S. Social Policy
- Transatlantic Social Thought and Reform
In my teaching I approach American Studies from an interdisciplinary perspective. In many of my courses I explore the interaction of history and culture, combining, for example, analyses of the myth of the West with explorations of the region’s history; cultural images of poverty and the making of social policy; religious imagery and political mobilization; and social ideas and social movements. I have extensive experience teaching on both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in a number of different countries.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Axel Schäfer
Philosophicum II
Jakob-Welder-Weg 20
Room 02.211
Phone: +49-6131-39-26767
a.schaefer@uni-mainz.de
Office hours during semester:
Wednesday, 5-6 p.m
Please contact Anette Vollrath for an appointment.