This hybrid seminar in the spring quarter of 2022 was a collaboration between UCLA's Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and the Thomas Mann House. Open to undergraduate and graduate students alike, it examined the long history of exchange between Los Angeles and Europe. Led by Professor David Kim, it gave an overview of transatlantic cultural, literary, and historical exchanges going as far back as the colonial era. Students applied their newly acquired knowledge to current transatlantic debates in culture, politics, and society. By integrating these lessons into community-engaged interviews with four Thomas Mann Fellows, they explored praxis-oriented approaches to transatlantic European studies. The Thomas Mann Fellows were Sunhild Kleingärtner, Christine Landfried, Andreas Nitsche, and Claus Pias. Students also participated in an interview workshop led by Lynell George, a renowned journalist and essayist.

 

The aim of the class was to explore educational partnerships beyond the university and to reflect critically on translocal debates on democratic action. The following student projects are examples of these community engaged, student driven projects. Instead of being conventional academic papers, they address community-based problems in interdisciplinary modes of scholarship. They reconceptualize students as co-creators of knowledge beyond a strictly academic discourse, such that it reaches a wider audience invested in mutual citizenship. The student projects examine many different layers of exchange between Europe and the United States in modern history.