Anne Zetsche

Biography

Anne was born in Berlin. After graduating from high school she spent a year in the United States getting to know the people, the country and the language. This experience fuelled her interest in history, and especially her interest in US history and politics. From 2002 until 2010 she studied at the Free University Berlin majoring in History and North American Studies. In the summer of 2004 she volunteered in the presidential campaign of John F. Kerry and John Edwards working in the New Jersey campaign office in Trenton. Taking part in the Erasmus exchange programme she went to Northern Ireland to study American History at the University of Ulster in 2006/2007. During her studies at the Free University she also has worked as research assistant at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) and as teaching assistant at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University in Berlin.

As a German with considerable US experience it does not surpirse that her research interests lie mainly in German-American relations.

Qualifications

Magistra Artium (MA) in History and North American Studies

Thesis

Anne’s dissertation project looks at German-American elite networking during the first half of the cold war period until the mid-1970s. In particular she studies two private organisations, one in Germany the Atlantik-Brücke and the other one in the US, the American Council on Germany. The two groups are used as vehicles to explore the unofficial dimension of bilateral relations between the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany, portraying them as public diplomacy agents in a transnational state-private network (Parmar et al.).

Research Themes & Scholarly Interests

Informal elite networks of the Western world (USA and Western Europe) in the period of the Cold War; new diplomatic history, transnational perspectives on international relations.

Key Publications/Outputs

“The Ford Foundation’s Role in Promoting German-American Elite Networking during the Cold War” Journal of Transatlantic Studies (forthcoming 2015)

"The Atlantik-Brücke and the American Council on Germany," Transatlantic Perspectives, 2014, Transatlantic Perspectives. 18 Dec 2014 http://www.transatlanticperspectives.org/entry.php?rec=133

"Eric M. Warburg," Transatlantic Perspectives, 2014, Transatlantic Perspectives. 18 Dec 2014 http://www.transatlanticperspectives.org/entry.php?rec=156

Supervisors

Dr Sylvia Ellis and Dr Daniel Laqua