I am a historian and Americanist living in Cologne, Germany, with a doctorate in American Cultural History from LMU Munich (2013). My research focuses on the United States and Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I work as a lecturer at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies of Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz. From 2014–2016, I was a postdoctoral fellow and member of the “Economization of the Social” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. In 2023, I became a guest fellow at the GIGA.
My book Wires That Bind: Nation, Region, and Technology in the American Southwest, 1854–1920 was published by Transcript in 2017. “Thus, History!,” a research blog I still occasionally write, features commentary on history as well as on current events in historical perspective. I have published on a wide variety of historical topics, including the communications revolution, U.S. popular culture, and various aspects of intellectual history.
I host two podcasts, the German language “Die letzten Detektive,” a review podcast about a series of neo-noir sci-fi radio plays from the 1980s and 1990s (with Rudolf Inderst), and, in English, “In Front of Ira,” a deep dive into the tropes, plots, and historical context of romantic comedies (with Sabrina Mittermeier).
You can find me on social media as @torstenkathke, e.g. on Mastodon, Twitter (no longer very actively), LinkedIn and Instagram. I’m @kathke.com on Bluesky.