Norbert Finzsch is Professor Emeritus of North American History at the University of Cologne. He studied History and German Literature at the Universities of Cologne, Bordeaux and Berkeley, CA. Finzsch served as Deputy Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington DC before his appointment as Professor of History at the University of Hamburg in 1992. In 2001 he was appointed to the Chair of North American History at Cologne. Finzsch received several fellowships at the University of California at Berkeley, the Université Michel de Montaigne in Bordeaux and at the Humanities Research Centre of the ANU at Canberra, Australia. In 2017 he received the Meyer-Struckmann-Preis of the University of Düsseldorf for his life achievement.

Teaching at the JFKI

Summer Semester 2020

Graduate:

American Film Music from the Silent Movies to the Sound Film, Fridays 10:00-12:00

Winter Semester 2019/20

Graduate:

Sigmund Freud in the U.S., Fridays, 10:00-12:00

Finzsch started out as a Western historian with a quantitative dissertation on the California Gold Rush. His habilitation dealt with the social classes of the Rhineland at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. Since then he has specialized on African American History and the history of genocides. In 2007 he developed a research insterest in Australian and New Zealand history. After his retirement in 2016 Finzsch started reseraching the history of cliterodectomy in the "West".

Finzsch, Norbert. Die Goldgräber Kaliforniens: Arbeitsbedingungen, Lebensstandard und politisches System um die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982.
Finzsch, Norbert. Obrigkeit und Unterschichten: Zur Geschichte der rheinischen Unterschichten gegen Ende des 18. und zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1990.
Norbert Finzsch and Hermann Wellenreuther. Liberalitas: Festschrift für Erich Angermann zum 65. Geburtstag. Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1992.
Finzsch, Norbert, and Jürgen Martschukat. Different Restorations: Reconstruction and "Wiederaufbau" in Germany and the United States, 1865, 1945 and 1989. Providence: Berghahn, 1996.
Finzsch, Norbert, and Robert Jütte. Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500-1950. Publications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Finzsch, Norbert, and Dietmar Schirmer. Identity and Intolerance: Nationalism, Racism, and Xenophobia in Germany and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Finzsch, Norbert. Visions of the Future in Germany and America. Oxford: New York, 2001. Print.
Finzsch, Norbert, and Ursula Lehmkuhl. Atlantic Communications: The Media in American and German History from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Berg, 2004.
Finzsch, Norbert. Konsolidierung Und Dissens: Nordamerika Von 1800 Bis 1865. Münster: LIT, 2005.
Finzsch, Norbert, Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, and Anną Kurpiel. Skreśleni: Odbieranie Tytułów Naukowych Przez Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau W Latach 1933-1945. 2014.