Sophie Spieler has received a post-doc fellowship as part of the DRS HONORS Fellowship Program of the Dahlem Research School. She will use this twelve-month fellowship to work on her project "Fun in Postbellum American Culture: Practices, Discourses, Articulations" (Working Title).

The aim of the project is to investigate the emergence of a culture of fun in late nineteenth-century America. The primary research interests concern the emerging infrastructures, discursive negotiations and semantic/aesthetic articulations of the experience of 'fun', in particular in the socio-political context of unprecedented levels of mass immigration and the increasing solidification of market capitalism.

This year, Sophie Spieler completed her dissertation "The Wealthy, the Brilliant, the Few: The Discourse of Elite Education in Twenty-First-Century America" at the Graduate School of North American Studies (JFKI, FU Berlin).