Dr. Anja-Maria Bassimir
wiss. Mitarbeiterin, Abteilung Schäfer
I am an assistant professor (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) and postdoctoral researcher in Professor Axel Schäfer’s team at the Obama Institute. My research interests include religious history and especially evangelicalism, periodical studies, transnational American studies, social history, food policy, and studies of migration and the welfare state.
After studying history and religious studies at the Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY, and at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, I earned my PhD at the Westfälische Wilhelms University in Münster. I have been working at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz since 2013, first as part of the DFG Research Group 1939 Un/Doing Differences on a project on religious periodical studies and since 2021 in the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1482 Human Categorization on a project on transnational U.S. American food policy.
My current research is part of the SFB Project B06: Migration and Welfare States in the USA – Global and National Dynamics in Bureaucratic Human Differentiation, led by Axel Schäfer. My project centers on food policy as one aspect of social policy and state building in the context of global and national dynamics of bureaucratic human differentiation. It asks what role transnational American food policy plays in sorting, grouping, and distinguishing people.
My book Evangelical News: Politics, Gender, and Bioethics in Conservative Christian Magazines of the 1970s and 1980s was published with Alabama University Press in 2022; I am the coeditor with Oliver Scheiding of Religious Periodicals and Publishing in Transnational Contexts: The Press and the Pulpit.
Teaching
I have taught courses in U.S. history and cultural studies, including Cultural Studies I, and courses focusing, for example, on evangelicalism, religion and media, conservatism, women’s history, labor history, and social movements.
Contact
Dr. Anja-Maria Bassimir
Philosophicum II
Jakob-Welder-Weg 20
Room 02.215
Office hours: by appointment