Join us in welcoming Emily J. Levine as she discusses Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University with Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Michael Kimmage!
About Allies and Rivals:
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 excellence in higher education? 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 seen 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 PhD to create the modern research university, a hybrid now replicated the world over.
In a captivating narrative spanning one hundred years, Levine upends notions of the university as a timeless ideal, restoring the contemporary university to its 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.
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Emily J. Levine is associate professor of education and (by courtesy) history at Stanford University. She is the author of Allies and Rivals and Dreamland of Humanists, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a professor at the American University in Washington, D.C., where she directs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL). Her most recent book is Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right.
Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America, specializing in the history of the United States, Europe, and Russia. His most recent book is The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy.
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This event will be hosted in-person at Lost City Books! Masks will be required of attendees.
Accessibility note: This event will be held up two fight of stairs. Lost City Books does not have an elevator. This event will be simultaneously live streamed on our YouTube page!
Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University will be available at Lost City Books!