Greetings
You are kindly invited to our talk with Emily J. Levin on Allies and rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University. Monday, July 19th,19.00. The zoom link is here .
During the nineteenth century, nearly ten thousand Americans traveled to Germany to study in universities renowned for their research and teaching. By the mid-twentieth century, American institutions led the world. How did America become the center of higher education excellence? And what does that story reveal about who will lead in the twenty-first century? Allies and Rivals is the first history of the ascent of American higher education told through the lens of German-American exchange. In a series of compelling portraits of such leaders as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Martha Carey Thomas, and W.E.B. Du Bois, Emily J. Levine shows how academic innovators on both sides of the Atlantic competed and collaborated to shape the research university. Even as nations sought world dominance through scholarship, universities retained values apart from politics and economics. Open borders enabled Americans to unite the English college and German Ph.D. to create the modern research university, a hybrid replicated the world over. In a captivating narrative spanning one hundred years, Levine upends notions of the university as a timeless ideal, restoring universities to their rightful place in history. In so doing she reveals that innovation in the twentieth century was rooted in international cooperation— a crucial lesson that bears remembering today.
A short bio: Emily Levineis an Associate Professor of Education and (by courtesy) History at Stanford University. Previously she was Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of North Carolina- Greensboro. Dr. Levine received her Ph.D. in History and the Humanities at Stanford and her BA from Yale, where she later returned as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. She is the author of Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize by the American Historical Association for the best book in European history from 1815 through the 20th Century. Levine has published in The New York Times, the LA Review of Books, Foreign Policy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed, as well as in top scholarly journals. Her new book Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University, which was supported by fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in July 2021.
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The upcoming events list for the coming months is available on the academic history series page page on maavarim website. I’ll be happy to receive suggestions for additional topics.
With regards
Prof. David Levi-Faur.
On behalf of maavarim project participants