Cleves, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Frank Mehring is a Professor of American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, and currently serves as the President of the Netherlands American Studies Association. His research and teaching focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture and music, theories of popular culture, transatlantic studies, and cultural translation processes between European and American contexts. In 2012, Mehring received the biennial Rob Kroes Award from the European Association for American Studies for his monograph The Democratic Gap (Winter, 2014). He is also the author of Sphere Melodies (2003), which explores the transcendentalist influences on composers Charles Ives and John Cage, and a biography of the German-American freedom fighter Charles Follen (Charles Follen, 2004). His edition of Follen’s writings, Between Natives and Foreigners, followed in 2007. Mehring’s recent research projects include The Transatlantic Soundtrack of Freedom (2025), Sound & Vision (2018), The Politics and Cultures of Liberation (2018), and a study on the artist Winold Reiss (2022). A former fellow of the German National Merit Foundation, he was awarded a DAAD fellowship at Harvard University’s Music Department (1997–98) and a Fulbright American Studies Fellowship at Harvard’s Department of English and American Literature and Language (2004–05). After 2006, he served as an assistant and guest professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin. In 2008 and 2009, he was a fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Mehring has also taught at the Berlin European Studies Program (FU-BEST), the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, and as an Erasmus Exchange Professor at Karl-Franzens-University Graz. Beyond academia, he has co-curated exhibitions on Winold Reiss, the Marshall Plan, and Liberation Songs, showcased in New York, Nijmegen, and The Hague.
As Chair of the Netherlands Association of American Studies, I provide strategic leadership for the field in the Netherlands and actively foster national and international collaboration, particularly with the European Association for American Studies.
As Regional Director of the German Atlantic Association, I represent the organization locally, build regional networks, and organize events that promote dialogue on transatlantic relations, security policy, and democratic values.
As Professor of American Studies and Transatlantic Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, I teach and research American visual culture and music in global and transatlantic contexts, focusing on cultural diplomacy, (self-)Americanization, popular culture and media theory, and race and racism across the Atlantic world. My work examines how local attachments and transnational movements intersect through cultural mobility, exploring topophilic relationships between place, memory, media, and identity across the Atlantic world.
Co-founder of the European Network Politics & Cultures of Liberation which seeks to provide a multi-perspective on the experience of liberation as part of a conscious effort to trace patterns in post-war cultural diplomacy. The Network was launched in 2014 at the 20th EAAS conference in the Hague.
AmLit – American Literatures (ISSN 2789-889X) is an international, peer-reviewed open-access journal based in the Research Area “American Studies II” at the University of Graz. The journal publishes innovative literary criticism in U.S. American, Canadian, and Latin American Studies. AmLit is a collaborative initiative uniting eight European universities: University of Graz (Austria) University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) University of Naples L'Orientale (Italy) Queen's University Belfast (United Kingdom) Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands) Palacký University Olomouc (Czech Republic) Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece) Akaki Tsereteli University (Georgia) The journal’s distinctive profile centers on cutting-edge research in digital literature and cultures, transnational and border studies, and visuality as well as trans- and intermediality.
The mission of the EAAS Digital Studies Network is to facilitate the communication and collaboration between scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in Europe with an interest in issues pertaining to the broader production and theorization of digital literary forms, digitality and popular culture, experimentation with print and digital writing and typographic practices, locative media and narrative as well as digital humanities within the context of American Studies. This Network will seek to connect with institutions, organizations, and postgraduate programs in Europe that specialize in this area of research so as to foster the channeling of information, effective contact between its members, and representation in EAAS biannual conferences and other fora as well as symposia with the aim of promoting digital studies research in Europe.