Professor Ruud Janssens is Chair of American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He specializes in the history of United States foreign and defense policy. Professor Janssens trained as a historian and America expert at the University of Amsterdam and Smith College (Northampton, MA). He has worked at the Royal Netherlands Naval College (1997-2002), and as a post-doc at Asia Studies at the University of Amsterdam (1997). He was the Erasmus Scholar at Harvard University in 2007. From 2008 to 2010, Janssens led a research group on the relations between major powers in 2020 as part of the government project Toekomstverkenningen (Future Studies) concerning the Department of Defense. In 2015, he was the independent advisor to the Department of Defense’s policy analysis of the 2005 Naval policy. In 2016, he was a member of the feedback group of the Ministry of Defense on the replacement of submarines. In 2018, he became an independent advisor to the Department of Defense’s policy analysis of the establishment of the Defense Helicopter Command in 2008. Professor Janssens coordinates the BA program in American Studies.
Dr. George Blaustein is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Nightmare Envy & Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2018), a study of 20th-century Americanist writing and institutions in the U.S. and abroad. His essays and reviews have appeared in N+1, New Yorker.com, Vrij Nederland, De Groene Amsterdammer, and the New Republic, as well as Amerikastudien/American Studies, American Quarterly, and European Journal of American Studies. He received his doctorate in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University, and is also the president of the Netherlands American Studies Association (NASA). Dr Blaustein coordinates the MA program in American Studies.
Dr. Katy Hull is Assistant Professor of Modern Gender History in the American Studies department. In addition to her PhD in US History (Georgetown University, 2018), she holds an MA in human rights, and an MA in international relations and international economics. From 2005 until 2010 she worked for the World Bank in Washington, DC. She is interested in twentieth century US history, intellectual history, women’s and gender history, masculinity, and civil rights. She is the author of The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism (Princeton University Press, 2021). Her current research project is on emotions and activism in New Left autobiographies. She is also on the board of the Netherlands American Studies Association.
Dr. Manon Parry is an academic researcher and exhibition curator. She is Professor of Medical History at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and Senior Lecturer in American Studies and Public History at the University of Amsterdam.
Her interests include the medical and health humanities, bioart and design, disability studies, museums and monuments, and digital public history. She has developed exhibitions on a wide range of topics, including global health and human rights, disability in the American Civil War, and medicinal and recreational drug use, with project budgets ranging from $14,500 to $3 million. She is co-editor, with Ellen S. More and Elizabeth Fee, of Women Physicians and the Culture of Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) , winner of the Archivists and Librarians in the Health Sciences Publication Award for Best Print Publication in 2012, and author of Broadcasting Birth Control: Mass Media and Family Planning (Rutgers University Press, 2013). Dr. Parry supervises students theses on women’s history, disability studies, gender and sexuality, mass media, health and medicine, and archives, museums and monuments.
