Universities and the Public Good: Research, Education, and Democracy since 1945
September 10 – 12, 2025 | Herrenhausen Palace Conference Center, Hanover, Germany
Supported by the Volkswagen Foundation
Convener: Axel Jansen (German Historical Institute Washington), Charles Dorn (Bowdoin College), Charlotte Lerg (Amerika Institut, LMU München), Till van Rahden (Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg), Richard Wetzell (German Historical Institute Washington)
Photo Credit: A. Rizzuto, Columbia University. Photograph by Anthony Angel (New York City, 1952), The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2020635787/.




Conference Venue, Hotel, Directions, and Transportation
Conference Venue
Herrenhausen Palace
Herrenhäuser Straße 5
30419 Hanover, Germany

Directions to the conference venue
For conference participants staying at the Smartcity Hotel, the conference venue can be easily reached within 20 minutes by public transportation.

- From the hotel, walk to the “Kröpcke” underground station.
- Take tram line 4 or 5 toward “Stöcken” or “Garbsen” and exit at “Herrenhäuser Gärten.”
- When exiting at “Herrenhäuser Gärten,” walk toward the front of the tram and cross the tracks.
- The entrance to the conference center is located in the right wing of Herrenhausen Palace, next to the restaurant “Grauwinkels Schlossküche.”
Hotel
Accommodation for conference participants is reserved at the centrally located Smart City Hotel am Thielenplatz, near Hanover Central Station (Hannover Hauptbahnhof).
- Upon arriving at the Hauptbahnhof, exit toward “Ernst-August-Platz/City” and turn onto Joachimstraße.
- The hotel is located at the intersection of Joachimstraße and Thielenplatz.
- Room reservations include breakfast.
Directions to the hotel from the airport
- Purchase a 2-Zone Ticket AB (€4.30) at the airport.
- Take the airport train (S5) to Hanover Central Station (Hannover Hauptbahnhof).
- The ride takes about 20 minutes.
Public Transportation tickets
- Participants traveling from outside Germany will receive a free public transportation pass valid from September 10 to 13, provided by the conference organizers.
- Passes will be distributed upon check-in at the hotel.Participants from Germany are kindly asked to use their Deutschlandticket for public transport during the conference.
- If you do not have access to a Deutschlandticket, please contact the conference organizers for assistance.
Travel Reimbursements
Media Release Form
The conference will be streamed, recorded, and visually documented (including photographs and videos) in whole or in part by the Volkswagen Foundation and its partners. These materials may be used for print and online publications, documentation, and reporting across various communication channels such as websites, social media, and other digital or print media. Upon request, photos, video, and audio recordings may also be made available to media outlets free of charge.
We kindly ask all conference participants to support the Volkswagen Stiftung’s science outreach efforts by completing and submitting the consent form.
Please note that submitting this declaration is voluntary. If you choose not to give your consent, this will not result in any negative consequences. We kindly ask you to also review the enclosed information regarding the declaration of consent and the provisions of Section 13 of the GDPR.
Participant Contact Information
Click here to see the password protected information
Schedule
Wednesday, September 10, 2025
1:00 pm
Arrival and Check-in
Snack
1:30 pm
Welcome remarks by Volkswagen Foundation
Welcome on behalf of Conveners, Axel Jansen (GHI Washington)
2:00 – 3:30 pm
Opening Roundtable: Universities and the Public Good
Moderators: Axel Jansen (GHI Washington) / Charlotte Lerg (LMU München)
Suzanne L. Marchand (Louisiana State University/President-Elect, American Historical Association)
Julie Reuben (Phillips Brooks Center for Public Service/Harvard University)
Susanne Schregel (Universität Halle-Wittenberg)
3:30 – 4:00 p.m.
Coffee Break
4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Panel 1: Europeanizing Higher Education and Research
Chair: Richard Wetzell (GHI Washington)
Johan Östling (Lund University): European Awakening: Discursive Europeanization and Academic Embrace of Europe at Lund University, 1985-1995
Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt (Ghent University): Creating a European Institutional Identity: The Changing Ambitions of Ghent University in the 1980s and 1990s
5:30 p.m.
Dinner
7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
Öffentliche Abendveranstaltung (in German)
Podiumsdiskussion: “Können Universitäten die Demokratie retten?”
Welcome: Axel Jansen (GHI Washington)
Moderator: Johannes Völz (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Julika Griem (Direktorin, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen)
Ian McNeely (Professor und Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Shalini Randeria (Rektorin, Central European University, Vienna)
Till van Rahden (Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg)
Stream live starting 7 pm CET / 1 pm EDT at https://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/de/veranstaltungen/koennen-universitaeten-die-demokratie-retten
Thursday, September 11, 2025
10:00 – 11:30 a.m.
Panel 2: Changing Missions of American Universities
Chair: Charlotte Lerg (LMU München)
Ariel Yingqi Tang (Stanford University): Reinventing Academic Freedom: The Kantorowicz Moment and the University’s Two Bodies
Ethan Schrum (Azusa Pacific University): The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II
11:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Coffee Break
12:00 – 1:15 p.m.
Panel 3: Universities as Research Institutions since 1945
Chair: Charles Dorn (Bowdoin College)
Emily Andrea Steinhauer (Royal Holloway University): Women and the Post-Exile University: Intersecting Marginalities within the European and American Research Landscape
Linda Eisenmann (Wheaton College): Academic Women in the Postwar Landscape: The Impact of University Research Growth on U.S. Women’s Careers
1:15 – 2:30 p.m.
Lunch
2:30 – 3:45 p.m.
Junior Scholars’ Forum, Session 1: Ivory Tower in Context
Chair: Richard Wetzell (GHI Washington)
Senior commentator: Philipp Gassert (Universität Mannheim)
Amit Kumar Sharma (Jawaharlal Nehru University): Rethinking Education and Democratizing the Public Sphere: Post-Colonial Transformations and Justice Movements in German Universities since 1945
Peter Simpson (Rutgers University-Newark): The Third Mission Activities of German Universities of Applied Sciences
3:45 – 5:00 p.m.
Junior Scholars’ Forum, Session 2: Academia, Theory, and Justice
Chair: Axel Jansen (GHI Washington)
Senior commentator: Charles Dorn (Bowdoin College)
Aron Schulze (Technische Universität Dresden): Between Humboldt and Neoliberalism: East German Universities after1989/90 and the Fiction of a “Catch-up Modernization”
Andrei Olteanu (Babes-Bolyai University): UNESCO, Romania, and Cold War Cultural Diplomacy: Scholarly Exchanges and Global Impact
5:00 – 6:15 p.m.
Junior Scholars’ Forum, Session 3: Architectures of Innovation
Chair: Karl Haikola (Lund University)
Senior commentator: Linda Perkins (Claremont Graduate University)
David Bates (Stanford University): Institutional Creativity and Avant-Garde Epistemologies: A History of Hybridization at Stanford
William Krause (Vanderbilt University): Planning for Freedom: Jonas Salk’s Laboratory of Life
6:15 – 7:00 p.m.
Dinner
7:00 p.m.
Public Keynote (in English)
Welcome: Charlotte Lerg (LMU Munich)
Moderator: Richard Wetzell (GHI Washington)
Mitchell Ash (Universität Wien): Higher Education in the United States and Europe since 1945: Game Over? Multiple Transformations and the Current Crisis
Stream live starting 7 pm CET / 1 pm EDT at https://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/de/veranstaltungen/multiple-transformations-and-current-crisis-higher-education-us-and-europe
Friday, September 12, 2025
10:00 – 11:30 a.m.
Panel 4: Local Roles of Universities
Chair: Christina Morina (University of Bielefeld)
Inna Semenenko (Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University): Displaced universities in Ukraine: Catalysts for community development, social cohesion, and civic engagement
Mark Freeman (University College London): An Open Tradition at an Elite University: Extramural Education and the University of Cambridge since 1945
11:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Coffee Break
12:00 – 1:15 p.m.
Panel 5: Epistemic Turning Points
Chair: Till van Rahden (Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg)
Gregory Jones-Katz (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt): Transatlantic Counter-Theoretical Culture Wars and the Global Role of Universities, 1980-2020
Adam Knowles (Universität Zürich): Analytic Philosophy and Neoliberal Governance: Exploring the Global Transformation of a Discipline
1:15 – 2:30 p.m.
Lunch
2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
Panel 6: A Plurality of Values
Chair: Raphael Rössel (GHI Washington)
Stefanie Coché (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen): Participatory Democracy as a Challenge and Resource for Evangelical Universities in the US: Balancing Conservativism and Diversity at Evangelical Colleges
Michael Hevel (University of Arkansas): LGBTQ+ College Students’ Legal Activism and Conservative Backlash in the Age of AIDS
4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Panel 7: Centers and Margins
Chair: Jonathan Zimmerman (University of Pennsylvania)
Christine Ogren (University of Iowa): The Urban University’s Role in Expanding Democratic Access to Higher Education in the U.S.: Lyle Spencer’s Trusteeship of Roosevelt University, 1945-1968
Ian F. McNeely (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill): The University Unfettered
5:30 – 7:00 p.m.
Panel 8: Transatlantic Connections
Chair: Stefanie Coché (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen)
Ethan Ris (University of Nevada, Reno): NGO and Association Involvement in Higher Education Policy in Post-War Germany and USA
Caitlin Harvey (University of Hull): American Private Foundations and British Colonial Higher Education, 1920-1970
7:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Dinner
8:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Concluding Roundtable: Past Transformations and Current Uncertainties for Universities
Moderators: Charlotte Lerg (LMU München) and Jonathan Zimmerman (University of Pennsylvania)
Alexander Mayer (Universität der Bundeswehr, München)
Ethan Ris (University of Nevada, Reno)
Anoush F. Terjanian (Human Rights Research and Education Centre, Ottawa)
Organizers
Axel Jansen
Axel Jansen is Deputy Director of the GHI Washington. He has published widely on the history of the United States from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries in transatlantic context. His key works include the first analytical biography of Alexander Dallas Bache, a leader of American scientists in mid-nineteenth-century America. In several recent articles on developmental biology since the Cold War, he has charted the scientific profession’s response to antagonistic public efforts to curtail its work, on the one hand, and public enthusiasm that has come with its own set of challenges, on the other.
Charles Dorn
Charles Dorn is an educational historian and the Barry N. Wish Professor of Social Studies at Bowdoin College (Maine, USA). His work has appeared in History of Education Quarterly, Southern African Review of Education, and Diplomatic History, and has been featured in Time and Fortune Magazines and on National Public Radio’s Throughline. Dorn is the recipient of two U.S. State Department Fulbright Awards and a Landhaus Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University (Munich, Germany). He is the author of For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America (Cornell University Press, 2017) and, with co-author Randall Curren, Patriotic Education in a Global Age (University of Chicago Press, 2018). His current project explores the history of environmental education in the United States between the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries.
Charlotte Lerg
Charlotte A. Lerg ist Akademische Rätin am Amerika-Institut der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München und Direktorin des Lasky Center for Transatlatnic Studies. Nach dem Studium der Geschichte und Philosophie an der schottischen Universität St. Andrews, wurde sie in Tübingen mit einer Arbeit zum Amerikabild des Vormärz promoviert. 2019 erschien ihre Münchner Habilitation Universitätsdiplomatie. Prestige und Wissenschaft in den transatlantischen Beziehungen 1890-1920. Als Gastprofessorin forschte und unterrichtete sie im Frühjahr 2025 an der University of California Berkeley. Fellowships führten Lerg ans John W. Kluge Center (Library of Congress) und ans German-Historical-Institute in Washington DC. An den Universitäten Bochum und Münster vertrat sie jeweils für mehrere Semester den Lehrstuhl für Nordamerikanische Geschichte. Ihr Lehrbuch zur Amerikanischen Revolution ging 2022 in die 2. Auflage. Weiter Publikationen befassen sich mit den transatlantischen Beziehungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert vor allem aus kultur- und wissen(schaf)sgeschichtlicher Perspektive. Sie ist eine der Herausgeberinnen von HIC. International Yearbook for Knowledge and Society. Seit 2025 leitet sie das DFG-geförderte Forschungsprojekt Documentary Drawing in the 20th Century.
Till van Rahden
Till van Rahden is a Full Professor of German and European Studies at the Université de Montréal where he held a Canada Research Chair from 2006 to 2016. He is also a Research Professor at Carleton University and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg. He specializes in European history since the Enlightenment and is interested in the tension between the elusive promise of democratic equality and the recurrent presence of diversity and moral conflicts.
In 2024 he was a Fellow at the “Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen,” Vienna, and in 2023, he was a Mercator-Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre/SFB 1482 “Studies in Human Categorisation” at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In 1993, he earned an M.A. in American History at Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in History (summa cum laude) at the University of Bielefeld in 1999. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, McGill University, the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Charles University in Prague, the universities in Graz, Innsbruck, Haifa, Siegen, and Munich, as well as and fellowships at research institutes in Berlin, Cologne, Freiburg, and Mainz.
He serves on the Advisory Board of the George L. Mosse Series in the “History of European Culture, Sexuality, and Ideas” (University of Wisconsin Press), the “Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute” (Oxford University Press), and the quarterly “Histoire, europe et relations internationales : Cahiers Sirice-Pierre Renouvin” (UMR Sirice).
Richard Wetzell
Richard F. Wetzell is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington and editor of the GHI’s Bulletin. Trained at Swarthmore College, Columbia, and Stanford University, he has taught at the University of Maryland, Georgetown University, and the Catholic University of America. His publications include Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking the Third Reich (co-edited, 2017) and Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany (ed., 2014). He is currently writing a book on “Racial Science and Nazi Biopolitics, 1933-1939.”
Participants
Mitchell Ash
Mitchell G. Ash (PhD Harvard University 1982), taught history and history of science at the University of Iowa from 1984 to 1997, and is now Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Vienna, Austria where he taught from 1997 to 2016. He was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg/Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin 1990-1991, and has held visiting professorships and fellowships at universities in Göttingen, Jerusalem, Berkeley and Princeton as well as the Max-Planck-Institute for History of Science in Berlin. A member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities as well as the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ash is author or editor of over 20 books and 200 articles and book chapters focusing on the relations of the sciences with politics, society and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
David Bates
David T. Bates is currently a PhD student in the History of Education program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on the institutional change of universities owing to the emergence of the human sciences from the Progressive Era to the Cold War. Previously, he worked in civic education and taught in elementary schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Boston, Massachusetts. He has degrees from the University of Rochester, the University of Chicago, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Stefanie Coché
Stefanie Coché is an assistant professor (PD, akad. Rätin) at Justus Liebig University Gießen (Germany) and has recently published her second book (Habilitation) on religious leaders in 19th and 20th century America (Religiöse Erweckung und Irdische Macht. Religion und Demokratie, Hamburger Edition 2025). In addition, she is leading a research group on “Evangelical Colleges in the US since 1945”. Her first book (Dissertation) deals with Psychiatric commitment in the age of extremes (Kritische Studien für Geschichtswissenschaft 2017, english translation: Routledge, Studies in Modern European History 2024) and has won five awards (including: Herbert-Steiner-Preis des Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstands; Dalberg Preis für interdisziplinäre Forschung der Akademie gemeinnütziger Wissenschaften zu Erfurt).
Linda Eisenmann
Linda Eisenmann is Emeritus Professor of Education and former Provost at Wheaton College, Massachusetts, and Adjunct Professor of Higher Education at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her scholarship examines women in higher education, historiography, and the history of gender in higher education. Former president of History of Education Society and Association for the Study of Higher Education, she has chaired editorial boards of Harvard Educational Review and Journal of Higher Education. Publications include, “Historical Considerations of Women and Gender in Higher Education: A Review of the Literature,” in Higher Education Handbook of Theory and Research (2023), “Women, Colleges, and World War II – What Do We Think We Know?” in 23 Myths about American Schools (2024), and Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945-1965 (2006). In addition to professorships, she has administered a Harvard University research center and served as dean of Arts and Sciences at John Carroll University in Ohio.
Mark Freeman
Mark Freeman is Professor of Social History and Education at University College London. He is the author of various books and articles on modern British social history and the history of education, including The Vital Message: Continuing Education and the University of Cambridge 1945–2010 (2023). He was co-editor of the journal History of Education from 2014 to 2025.
Philipp Gassert
Philipp Gassert is Professor of History at the University of Mannheim
Julika Griem
Julika Griem was Full Professor for English Literature at Darmstadt University of Technology (2005 – 2012) and at Goethe University Frankfurt (2012-2018). She completed her doctorate at the University of Freiburg and her habiliation at the University of Stuttgart. Since 2016, she has been Vice President of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). As of April 2018, she is Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI Essen). Her research interests are, among others, the analysis of the contemporary literary industry, its changing forms and rituals as well as the assessment of its methodologies; Science Policy; and the institutions and frameworks which enable literature and literary studies.
Karl Haikola
Karl Haikola is a post-doctoral researcher in history at the University of Lund. His PhD thesis (2018–2023) focused on the emergence, brief success and eventual marginalization of futures studies (also commonly known as “futurology” or “future research”) in Sweden in the 1970s and 80s. His research interests are contemporary history, the history of knowledge, the history of political ideas and university history. He is especially interested in the history of the so-called knowledge society as a form of collective self-understanding.
Caitlin Harvey
Caitlin Harvey is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Hull, and an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge (2023-2025). Her research examines the history of migration, race, settlement, and education in a British imperial and global context. Her scholarly interests also include Indigenous history and the institutional and political development of settler/Indigenous societies since 1800. From 2021 to 2024, she was an Early Career Research Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. She also holds a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University, along with degrees from the University of Oxford and the University of Western Ontario. Her current book project is titled, ‘Bricks and Mortar Boards: University-Building and the Growth of Settler Society, 1820-1920.’
Michael Hevel
Michael Hevel is associate professor of higher education and associate dean for research, strategy, and outreach in the College of Education and Health. His research focuses on the history of higher education, especially the history of college students. He has published in the History of Education Quarterly, Journal of College Student Development, and the Journal of Higher Education. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Higher Education, and his research has been supported by the Spencer Foundation and the National Academy of Education.
Jonathan Holst
Jonathan Holst is a PhD candidate at the Chair of Contemporary History at Giessen University and a member of the Giessen International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture. He studied history and philosophy at Kiel University, Sorbonne University, and ETH Zurich. From 2019 to 2020, he was a research associate at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science Studies in Lübeck, Germany, where he researched the history of suffering and injustice experienced by psychiatric patients. Since 2021, he has been working on his dissertation on the history of chronobiology from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Gregory Jones-Katz
Gregory Jones-Katz is an American intellectual and cultural historian. After holding the position of Research Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg from 2023 to 2024, he is now a Research Associate at the Institute for General and Comparative Literature at Goethe-Universität. Greg works in the fields of American intellectual and cultural history, the history of higher education, and the global history of the humanities. His first book Deconstruction: An American Institution is now available with the University of Chicago Press.
Adam Knowles
Adam Knowles is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at University of Zurich. His book Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence was published by Stanford University Press in 2019. In 2025 his translation of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1942-48 will be published by Indiana University Press. His research has been supported by the Volkswagen-Stiftung, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Educational Foundation, European Holocaust Research Infrastructure and German Historical Institute.
William Krause
William Krause is an historian of the modern United States, and his research investigates the relationship among expertise, public sensibilities, and institutional authority. He is currently earning his doctorate at Vanderbilt University, where he is writing a dissertation on the history of debates about genius in America since roughly the 1890s. His dissertation project has been generously supported by grants from the American Philosophical Society, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, among other organizations. In addition to research, he enjoys developing and teaching undergraduate courses in modern American history and science.
Amit Kumar Sharma
Amit Kumar Sharma is pursuing PhD at the Center of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India. His study nowadays focuses on a comparative study of affirmative action policies in higher education of Germany and India. He completed his M.Phil at JNU, exploring the untranslatability of postcolonial writings. He has also completed the Doctoral Certificate program in Global South Studies from Tuebingen University. Amit holds an MA in German Studies from JNU. His academic journey began with a BA (Hons) in German and French, Linguistics, Educational Science as optional subjects from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. Amit has received several scholarships, including a travel grant for the Kafka Transformed Conference at Oxford and the Lithuanian Language and Culture Winter Course at Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. He actively contributes to the academic community as a representative of the Student Faculty Committee (SFC) at the Center of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
Suzanne Marchand
Suzanne Marchand is LSU Systems Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She has written several books and many articles in the history of the humanities, and is now completing on on Herodotus among the Moderns. She is now President Elect of the American Historical Association.
Alexander Mayer
Alexander Mayer is a researcher in modern and contemporary history. Currently he is working on the history of meritocracy and social mobility in the 19th and 20th centuries. Alexander Mayer‘s research interests also include the history of universities and National Socialism. His PhD thesis deals with competition among universities since the 1980s. He has studied history, philosophy and German literature at LMU Munich and at Université de Perpignan (France).
Ian McNeely
Ian McNeely is Professor of History and Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of two books in German history (The Emancipation of Writing and Medicine on a Grand Scale) and two books in the history of knowledge (Reinventing Knowledge From Alexandria to the Internet and The University Unfettered).
Christina Morina
Christina Morina is Professor of General History with a particular focus on Contemporary History at the University of Bielefeld. Her research focuses on major themes in German and European history from the in 19th to the 21st century, particularly Nazism and the history of bystanding during the Holocaust; socialism, Marxism and communism; political and memory culture(s) in Germany since 1945, as well as the history of historiography. In 2024/25 she was Visiting Heuss Professor in History at The New School for Social Research.
Christine Orgen
Christine Ogren is Professor in the Department of Educational Policy and Leadership Studies at the University of Iowa, USA. A historian of education, she is author of The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (2005) and Summers Off? A History of U.S. Schoolteachers during the Other Three Months (forthcoming in October 2005 from Rutgers University Press), and co-editor of Rethinking Campus Life: New Perspectives on the History of College Students in the United States (2018). Chris has also published articles in History of Education Quarterly, Paedagogica Historica, and other journals. She is a former president of the U.S. History of Education Society and member of the Executive Committee of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education.
Andrei Olteanu
Andrei Olteanu is a PhD student in the third year at the Faculty of History and Philosophy of Babeș-Bolyai University, Doctoral School of History, Civilization, Culture. Ar the same faculty, he teaches the seminars on Analysis of Romania’s foreign policy and Introduction to Contemporary History of Romania, and he works as a Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs. He is an American Council for International Education 50 of 50 alumni, and an LSE Ideas award winner for essays in history. He has participated in over 25 conferences, and he has published articles and chapters in collective works on the Cold War, communism, cultural diplomacy, and propaganda.
Johan Östling
Johan Östling is a professor of history, director of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK), and a Wallenberg Academy Fellow. His research mainly focuses on the history of knowledge and modern and contemporary European history. Recent publications include the trilogy Circulation of Knowledge (2018), Forms of Knowledge (2020), and Knowledge Actors (2023), as well as the introductory book The History of Knowledge (2023). Östling serves as PI of the research project “The Europeanisation of the Universities: Transforming Knowledge Institutions from within, c. 1985–2010”.
Linda Perkins
Linda M. Perkins is University Professor and Director of Applied Gender Studies at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. She recently published To Advance the Race: Black Women’s Higher Education from the Antebellum Era to the 1960s (University of Illinois Press, 2024). It was selected as one of the best academic books of 2024 by Choice (organization of University librarians)
Shalini Randeria
Shalini Randeria was elected as president and rector of Central European University in 2021. She is the first woman, and the first person from the Global South, to take up this position since the founding of the university 30 years ago. Randeria has had a distinguished academic career as a sociologist/social anthropologist at institutions of higher education across Europe. She was rector of the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, and a professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, where she directed the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy. Randeria holds the Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen, where she leads a research group on “soft authoritarianisms.” She is deputy chair of the Class of Social and Related Sciences, Academia Europaea and a distinguished fellow of the Munk School, Toronto University. Randeria has published widely on the anthropology of globalization, law, the state, and social movements with a regional focus on India. Her influential podcast series, Democracy in Question, launched in 2021, is now in its tenth season.
Julie Reuben
Julie Reuben is a leading historian of education whose work explores how knowledge, morality, and democratic life intersect in the modern American university. Her landmark book, The Making of the Modern University, traces how U.S. higher education shifted from moral instruction to a model of scientific professionalism and value-neutral expertise. She is the the Faculty Director for the Phillips Brooks House Center for Public Service and Engaged Scholarship at Harvard.
Ethan Ris
Ethan Ris is Associate Professor of Higher Education Administration at the University of Nevada, Reno. His scholarship, which includes the 2022 book “Other People’s Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform” (University of Chicago Press), focuses on tertiary education policy in the 20th century. Dr. Ris has been supported by fellowships from the Spencer Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA).
Raphael Rössel
Raphael Rössel is a research fellow in North American history at the German Historical Institute Washington. His current research project focuses on the history of hazing at nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century U.S. colleges. He received his PhD at Kiel University in 2022 with a dissertation on the history of family care for children with disabilities in the Federal Republic of Germany. The study analyzes the social history of the everyday lives of households raising children with disabilities. It received multiple awards and was shortlisted for the prestigious Hedwig Hintze Preis for the best dissertation which is awarded by the German Association of Historians. The thesis appeared in book form as Belastete Familien? Eine Alltagsgeschichte westdeutscher Haushalte mit behinderten Kindern (1945–1990) (Campus 2022). His articles have appeared in the Journal of Modern European History, Studies in Contemporary History, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, and elsewhere.
Susanne Schregel
Susanne Schregel is particularly interested in the intersections of social history, political history, and the history of education, science, and knowledge. Her current research project, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and based at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, explores the history of various ‘free’ and ‘anti-universities.’ These institutions emerged as both political and artistic projects within the broader context of efforts to democratize higher education since the 1960s. Her recent publications include: Social Movements, Protest, and Academic Knowledge Formation. Interactions since the 1960s, in Moving the Social 60 (2018), pp. 5–26. Intelligenz. Eine Geschichte des Unterscheidens in Großbritannien und Deutschland (1880–1990), Frankf./M. 2025 (forthcoming). AHR History Lab: How to Make Peace with History while Making History with Peace (with Charles Howlett and Christian P. Peterson), in American Historical Review 130 (2025) 1, pp. 174–229. Geschichte und Gegenwart von Gegenunis, ORF Science, https://science.orf.at/forscherinnen/stories/3219113/, May 7, 2023.
Ethan Schrum
Ethan Schrum is associate professor of history at Azusa Pacific University, where he is also a faculty fellow in the Honors College and director of the Humanities Program. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in modern American intellectual history, Schrum has concentrated his scholarship on twentieth century thought and the role of the university in American society. He is the author of The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II (Cornell University Press, 2019) and numerous articles on the history of American universities.
Aron Schulze
Aron Schulze is a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the Technical University of Dresden. He studied History, German Studies and Education at Leipzig University from 2017 to 2023, where he completed the First State Examination for Teaching at Grammar Schools. His doctoral project “Special Status in Transformation? The Technical University Dresden in the ‘Hochschulumbau Ost’ after 1989/90” is supervised by Prof. Dr. Dagmar Ellerbrock.
Inna Semenenko
Inna Semenenko is a Doctor of Economic Sciences and Professor at the Department of Economics and Entrepreneurship at Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University, a twice-displaced institution now operating in Kyiv. Having personally experienced displacement twice – first from Luhansk to Siverskodonetsk and then to Kyiv – Inna Semenenko brings a unique perspective to research and practical activities on community resilience, social cohesion, and civic engagement. As Head of the Resource Centre for Sustainable Development, Inna Semenenko leads initiatives that empower youth, foster social cohesion, and promote sustainable development goals.
A recipient of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine Scholarship for young scientists, Inna Semenenko has participated in international leadership programs at Harvard, Cornell, the Swedish Institute and others. Inna Semenenko’s research explores the transformative role of displaced universities in community recovery and democratic resilience, emphasizing their potential as catalysts for societal impact and inclusive local governance, as well as sustainable regional and local development. She is personally involved in the development and implementation of local recovery and reconstruction projects in war-affected communities in Ukraine, providing her expertise, knowledge and leadership.
Peter Simpson
Peter Simpson is a social policy researcher with experience conducting qualitative and quantitative research in education, labor and workforce development. He brings experience working across the fields of research, evaluation and technical assistance in the for-profit, non-profit and government sectors. He enjoys collaborating with multidisciplinary teams, partners, and clients to design, implement, and evaluate interventions that address complex and pressing challenges at scale.
Emily Steinhauer
Emily A. Steinhauer is an intellectual historian interested in 20th century cultures of knowledge-production, the role of women intellectuals within and the impact of exile and post-exile on these: her current research project considers the works and careers of several women sociologists in the interwar and post-war period. She holds a PhD from Queen Mary University of London, and after postdoctoral research at the German Historical Institute London, now teaches at Royal Holloway University of London.
Ariel Yingqi Tang
Ariel Yingqi Tang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Civics Initiative, Stanford University. Her research is broadly concerned with Enlightenment intellectual history and the history of political thought. She received her PhD in Political Science from Yale University and is currently working on a book manuscript about the idea of Bildung and the rise of the modern research university.
Anoush F. Terjanian
Anoush Fraser Terjanian currently serves as a Fellow of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre, Her research and teaching have focused on 18th-century France—birthplace of political and economic theories under renewed evaluation, namely imperialism, modern democracy, and capitalism. Dr Terjanian previously served (on secondment) as the founding Director of the US Social Science Research Council’s Anxieties of Democracy program. In that role she collaborated with an eminent Advisory Committee to design, fund, promote, and manage this international venture seeking to incubate and broadcast a better understanding of the dilemmas of legitimacy and capacity faced by established democracies. A former Research Fellow at Brown and Harvard universities, Dr Terjanian was re-appointed by the Governor-in-Council to a second term on the Governing Council of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in 2021, where she served on the Executive Committee.
Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt
Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt is a historian and sociologist, working as a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent and Lund University. She works on the history of science and the humanities, the history of academic historiography, and the role of the past in contemporary societies. Her doctoral thesis, The Price of History (2024), explored the history of European funding for historical research since 1970. She has published on the history of (European) research policy, the role of historians in policy, how populists use the past, and the history of peer review, both in academic and public outlets. This presentation is part of her ongoing work in the project “The Europeanisation of the Universities” from Lund University.
Johannes Völz
Johannes Völz is Professor of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics at Goethe-University Frankfurt. He is the spokesperson of the DFG Research Training Group “Aesthetics of Democracy”, of the “John McCloy Transatlantic Forum” and of the research collective “Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World.”
Jonathan Zimmerman
Jonathan Zimmerman is Professor of History of Education and the Berkowitz Professor in Education at the University of Pennsylvania. A former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher, Zimmerman is the author of “The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America” and eight other books. He is also a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and other popular newspapers and magazines.
