Prof. Dr. Axel R. Schäfer has been appointed to a new professorship in American Studies with a focus on history. Professor Schäfer comes to Johannes Gutenberg University from Keele University in the UK, where he was Professor of American History and Director of the David Bruce Centre for American Studies. In his research, he focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century US intellectual and cultural history, with a particular emphasis on religion and politics, transatlantic social thought, and public policy. He is the author of three monographs: Piety and Public Funding: Evangelicals and the State in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011); and American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875-1920: Social Ethics, Moral Control, and the Regulatory State in a Transatlantic Context (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000). Professor Schäfer has also published numerous journal articles and essays in edited volumes, including a prize-winning essay on W. E. B. Du Bois in the Journal of American History. In his current research he examines the nexus between immigration and welfare state-building in the United States, Britain, and Germany in the decade after World War I.
He is also working on 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.