dr. G.H. (George) Blaustein

George Blaustein is senior lecturer of American Studies and History 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 Americanist writing and institutions in the 20th century. His essays and reviews have appeared in N+1, New Yorker.com, The New Republic, Vrij Nederland, and De Groene Amsterdammer, as well as Amerikastudien/American Studies and American Quarterly. He received his doctorate in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University, and is the president of the Netherlands American Studies Association (NASA).

Book

Nightmare Envy & Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018)

Essays & Reviews

• "Portraits in Oil," N+1 (November 1, 2019). [in Dutch translation: "Onze kunst, maar dan heel anders," De Groene Amsterdammer (September 11, 2019)]
• "The Audacity of Grief," The New Republic (May 16, 2019). [in Dutch translation: "Amerika's treurzanger," De Groene Amsterdammer (January 9, 2020)]
• H-Diplo Roundtable Review, Volume XX, No. 25 (February 18, 2019): on David H. Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (2016).
• "A New Translation of an Anti-Heroic German Doorstopper of 1968," New Yorker.com (November 26, 2018).
• "My Fellow Prisoners: On John McCain," N+1, Issue 33 (Winter 2019).
• "Trolling and Terrorism: Surrealism in Charlottesville," De Groene Amsterdammer (August 23, 2017). [in Dutch translation]
• "The Tomb of Adam and the Tomb of Ornithorhynchus," in American Phantasmagoria: Modes of Representation in US Culture; in honor of Alide Cagidemetrio (Venice, Supernova, 2017), 45-64. 
• "Act Normal or Go Away: Dutch Election Diary," N+1 (March 18, 2017). 
• "This is Not the Apocalypse," N+1 (January 12, 2017). 
• "The Obama Speeches," N+1, Issue 27 (Winter 2017).
• "Miracles and Mummeries: Antonin Scalia and American Religion," N+1, issue 25 (Spring 2016).
• "Culture, Personality, and the American Century," American Quarterly, 66.4 (December 2014): 1117-1127.
• "Redeemer Nation / Remedy Nation: American Studies and Military Occupation," in Legacies of the U.S. Occupation of Japan: Appraisals after Sixty Years, edited by Rosa Caroli and Duccio Basosi (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).
• "Why American Civilization?: American Literature and Academic Exchange in Occupied Europe," Zeitgeschichte, 39.1 (May 2012): 20-31.
• "Flight to Germany: Paul Beatty, the Color Line, and the Berlin Wall," Amerikastudien / American Studies 55.4, special issue on "African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges" (April 2011): 725-738.
• "'Other' American Studies: The Salzburg Seminar, American Intellectuals and Postwar Europe," in E pluribus unum or E pluribus plura? Unity and Diversity in American Culture, edited by Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, David Mauk, and Ole Moen (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011)

Courses