Regensburg European American Forum

Join REAF and the Off the Road (ERC Project) team in welcoming Prof. Dr. James van Dyke to Regensburg.

Prof. Dr. van Dyke will give his talk titled “John Heartfield and the Reality of Automobility in Ilya Ehrenburg's Das Leben des Autos” on 04 December 2026 at 05:00pm in the Großer Sitzungssaal (PT 3.0.79). You are cordially invited to partake in discussions with us and our guest.

About the scholar
After receiving his PhD with a dissertation on the German painter Franz Radziwill, James van Dyke taught, translated, and worked as a free-lance museum docent and scholar in Germany in the 1990s. In 2000, he returned to the United States, where he taught at Reed College and Oberlin College until arriving at the University of Missouri in 2010. Trained in the social history of art, he is a specialist in twentieth-century German painting and politics, with a particular interest in the ways in which artworks, artists, and artistic institutions have been and continue to be shaped by catastrophic historical events, structural social contradictions, and extreme ideological responses to them. While he has published on the work of a number of artists, at the center of his research over the last fifteen years has been the painting of Otto Dix, examined both in detail and situated in the broad fields of artist production, politics, and economics. With the completion of his book on Dix, a new, very different book-length project is taking shape. It will examine the the styles, iconographies, and functions of the corporate imagery of the Royal Dutch Shell group in competing and conflicting political systems between the late 1920s and the mid-1940s, above all concentrating on the United Kingdom, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and revolutionary Mexico. This project aims to bring together the methods and and interests of the social history of art with the ideas of ecocriticism. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from, among others, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung, the Getty Research Library, the National Humanities Center, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the American Academy in Berlin.