Department of World Languages & Cultures

Kevin Amidon, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Program/s

German

Interests

Kevin S. Amidon is Associate Professor of German Studies in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the Iowa State University, where he serves also as a contributing member of the faculty in History of Technology and Science. He studied German, economics, history, musicology, and art history in Ann Arbor, Freiburg, Princeton, Frankfurt am Main, and Berlin, and received his Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University in 2001. His graduate work focused on cultures of opera during the Weimar Republic, exploring the work of Brecht and Weill, Schoenberg, and Krenek. He has published on eugenics, race theory, feminist evolutionary thought, the early Frankfurt School, American railroads and agricultural research, Brecht and Weill, Kafka, and Krenek. His current research projects include book-length studies of the status of Hören (hearing, attention, obedience, and ownership) in the German opera of the 1920s, and of the cultures of investigation and persuasion in the German life sciences in the early twentieth century. During 2003-2004 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Selected Publications

“The Visible Hand and the New American Biology: Toward an Integrated Historiography of Railroad-Supported Agricultural Research,” Agricultural History 82.3 (Summer 2008): 309-36.

“Sex on the Brain: The Rise and Fall of German Sexual Science,” Endeavour 32.2 (June 2008): 64-69.

“What Happens to Countess Geschwitz? Revisiting Homosexuality in Horkheimer and Adorno.” The New York Journal of Sociology 1 (2008): 1-24.

“‘Diesmal fehlt die Biologie!’ Max Horkheimer, Richard Thurnwald, and the Biological Prehistory of German Sozialforschung,” New German Critique 104 (Vol. 35 No. 2, Summer 2008): 103-37.

“Carrie Chapman Catt and the Evolutionary Politics of Sex and Race, 1885-1940,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68.2 (April 2007): 305-28.

Professional Activity

Postdoctoral Fellow, Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, 2003-4

Grants

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Grant, 2002, 2000

Awards

Margaret and Paul Lurie Prize for Excellence in Teaching, University of Michigan Honors Program, 2001