American Studies

I received my M.A. degree from the University of Oregon in 1989 and my Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1994.  After teaching in the United States for a brief period I joined the Civic Education Project and worked as Visiting Assistant Professor at P. J. Šafarik University in Slovakia and J. E. Purkyn? University in the Czech Republic.  During this time I also taught intermittently in the Department of English and American Studies at Charles University in Prague and served as the programme's Director of American Studies.  

In 1997 I joined the Center for U.S. Studies at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) as American Studies Fellow.  During this time I also taught at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.  In September 2000 I came to Keele to continue my career in the School of American Studies.  The main focus of my work at Keele over the past few years has been the directorship of the David Bruce Centre (DBC), an internationally recognized hub for the study of the United States and the largest centre in the Research Institute for the Humanities.  

In this role I have increased research support for faculty and postgraduate students and concentrated resources on establishing international contacts and organizing a wide range of academic events.  In addition, I helped set up a new organization of historians of the twentieth century U.S. (HOTCUS).  

I am also active in various committees of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and in the American Studies Network (ASN).

My research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century US intellectual and cultural history, with a particular emphasis on religion and politics, transatlantic social thought, and the link between ideas and institutions in public policy.  I recently published two monographs on church-state relations in the United States.  Piety and Public Funding: Evangelicals and the State in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press) shows that evangelicals, though holding to the ideals of church-state separation, gradually took advantage of expanded public funding opportunities for religious aid, health care, education, and social welfare.  This was especially evident in the Sunbelt where the postwar Right would achieve its earliest success.  Contrary to evangelicals' own claims, liberal public policies were thus a boon for, not a threat to, their own institutions and values.  Countercultural Conservatives: From Postwar Neo-Evangelicalism to the New Christian Right (University of Wisconsin Press) traces the evolution of a diffuse and pluralistic movement into the modern conservative political force.  It suggests that evangelicals did not simply reject the countercultural ideas of the 1960s, but absorbed and extended key aspects of the insurgent worldview.  In my next research project I examine the development of transatlantic social visions beyond "states" and "markets" in the aftermath of the devastation of World War I.  In particular, I seek to explore the coalescence of art, design, technology, social reforms, and radical politics in areas such as urban planning, social housing, savings banks, and the cooperative movement.  Moreover, I am working on a transnational project on the role immigration policies and discourses have played in the formation of modern welfare states.

In my teaching I approach American Studies from an interdisciplinary perspective.  In many of my modules 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 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.  As an Instructor at the University of Washington I taught courses in the Comparative History of Ideas programme.  

While employed as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Slovakia and the Czech Republics I offered modules on American culture and society during the interwar period, film and media in the U.S., and turn-of-the-century historical thought in Europe.  As American Studies Fellow at Halle-Wittenberg and Instructor at the Kennedy Institute in Berlin I taught courses on sociology and social activism in the Progressive Era and the 1960s, and on the cultural history of the U.S. welfare state.  At Keele I recently offered modules on social movements and social thought since 1877, and on religion in American politics and culture.  

In addition I regularly teach a range of survey courses and modules on the history of the American West, Cold War culture, and twentieth-century policy history.  I have supervised numerous undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations in these fields, and have recently developed a new postgraduate research module with a strong emphasis on historiography.  I greatly enjoy teaching and have received consistently favourable evaluations.

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