Dr. Anja-Maria Bassimir

I am a research associate and postdoctoral researcher in Professor Axel Schäfer’s team at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies. My research interests include religious history, in particular evangelicalism, periodical studies, transnational American studies, social history, food policy, and studies of migration and the welfare state, all focused on the United States.

After studying history and religious studies at the Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY, and at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, I earned my PhD at the University of Münster. I have been working at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since 2013, first as part of the DFG Research Unit 1939 “Un/doing Differences: Practices in Human Differentiation” on a project on religious periodical studies, and since 2021 at the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1482 “Studies in Human Categorisation” on a project on US food policy.

My current research is part of the CRC 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 explores the role US 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 coeditor, with Oliver Scheiding, of Religious Periodicals and Publishing in Transnational Contexts: The Press and the Pulpit, published with Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2017, and with Stefan Gelfgren of the forthcoming Protestant Periodicals in Transition: From the Twentieth Century to the Digital Age, published with Brill in 2023.

Foto: Stephanie Füssenich