Jeff Bowersox
Assistant Professor
PhD, University of Toronto, 2008
Liberal Arts Building 454
601-266-4519
jeff.bowersox@usm.edu
Jeff Bowersox came to the University of Southern Mississippi in 2008 after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. His research interests revolve around German and European contacts with the wider world, particularly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he is currently revising his dissertation, entitled "Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Education and the Modern Colonial Imagination in Germany, 1871-1914," into a book manuscript. Through chapters on classroom instruction, popular literature, toys and games, and the German equivalent of the Boy Scouts, this project examines the ways that Germans used an imaginary colonial world to reach and teach youth. It emphasizes the tensions and intersections between commercialized mass culture and mass educational projects and suggests that colonial references provided a sort of universal language that could be used to have conversations on the most varied topics of immediate interest.
He has published excerpts of this work in three edited collections and has also published articles on German-Polish relations, colonial exhibitions, and the black diaspora in Germany around the turn of the twentieth century. Other research and teaching interests include cultural history, the German diaspora, and the history of Berlin.
Department of History
http://www.usm.edu/history
601.266.4333 • history@usm.edu