benjamin alpers

ICL-QUESTIONNAIRE
NAME: Benjamin L. Alpers GRANT PERIOD: September 16, 2007-
July 15, 2008
EMAIL ADDRESS: balpers@ou.edu BORN: August 1, 1965
PRESENT POSITION US: LANGUAGES: German (fair)
Reach for Excellence Associate Professor Russian (fair)
Honors College, University of Oklahoma
GERMAN HOST INSTITUTION
University of Leipzig
(The website for the Institut für Amerikanistik at Leipzig is: http://americanstudies.uni-leipzig.de/ )
ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE
United States History
AREAS OF RESEARCH
20 th -Century Intellectual and Cultural History, with special interests in Political Culture and Film History.
Current research focuses on the history of Leo Strauss and Straussian political philosophy in U.S. academic
and political life.
POSSIBLE LECTURE TOPICS
The Straussians, Post-War U.S. Conservatism, and the Republican Party
Leo Strauss: Weimar Jewish Thinker in Cold War America
Changing U.S. Conceptions of Dictatorship and Democracy
Frank Borzage's German Trilogy: Melodrama and Antifascism in 1930s Hollywood
Various Other Topics in the History of U.S. Political Culture and in Film History
ACADEMIC TRAINING AND DEGREES
PhD, History, Princeton University, 1994
MA, History, Princeton University, 1990
AB, Social Studies, Harvard University, 1986

PREVIOUS POSITIONS
2004-2005, American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Fellow
1997-1998, Visiting Assistant Professor, History, University of Missouri
1994-1997, Lecturer, History and American Studies, Princeton University
PUBLICATIONS (selected)
Book: Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-
1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2003)
Article: "This Is The Army: Imagining a Democratic Military in World War II," Journal of American History,
Vol. 85, No. 1, June 1998, 129-63. [Reprinted in Gordon Martel (ed.), The World War Two Reader (London:
Routledge, 2004).]
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