June 10 11:45 am – 1:15 pm
SR 34.D2, Attemsgasse 25/3rd floor, 8010 Graz
Prof. Volker Depkat is a trained historian and Professor of American Studies
at the University of Regensburg.
He has published widely on the history of North America in continental
perspective, the history of European-American relations, biography and
autobiography and visual culture studies in transatlantic perspective.
He received his PhD from the University of Göttingen for his book on
Amerikabilder in politischen Diskursen. Deutsche Zeitschriften 1789 –
1830 (Stuttgart 1998). In this study he reconstructs the images of America
circulating in Germany between the two French revolutions, and he analyzes
their communicative functions for the formation and differentiation of the
political spectrum in Germany.
His second book Lebenswenden und Zeitenwenden. Deutsche Politiker und
die Erfahrungen des 20. Jahrhunderts (München 2007), which he wrote as assistant professor of history
at the University of Greifswald in Pommerania, analyzes autobiographies of German politicians who
were born around 1880 and experienced the whole “age of catastrophe” as grown-ups. Reading their
autobiographies as sites of biographical and historical meaning-making, Volker Depkat investigates the
questions of how ‘biography’ and ‘history’ were intertwined in the autobiographical narrative, how the
experience of twentieth-century history shaped political identities in Germany, and what this meant for
the success of the “Second German Democracy” after 1945.
Among the numerous publications which he has written since are Geschichte Nordamerikas. Eine
Einführung (Köln: Bohlau 2008), American History/ies in Germany. Assessments, Transformations,
Perspectives., Spec. Issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies 54.3 (2009), Visual Cultures -
Transatlantic Perspectives, eds. Volker Depkat and Meike Zwingenberger (Heidelberg: Winter 2012),
Religion and Politics. Transnational Historical Approaches, eds. Volker Depkat and Jürgen Martschukat
(Washington DC/Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP 2013).
He has just fi nished a one-volume history of the United States for a German publisher scheduled to be out this year.