Volker Janssen, Ph.D.

Biography

Volker Janssen specializes in the history of California, American prisons and rehabilitation programs in the mid-twentieth century, the American economy, and cultures of technology. He has published essays on the history of incarceration in the Journal of American History, the history of science journal Osiris, in Darren Dochuk’s and Michelle Nickerson’s Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region, as well as Rob Chase’s Caging Borders and Carceral States. His book on the emergence of California’s Department of Corrections with Oxford University Press has long been in the making and will be completed in 2020. His edited volume Where Minds and Matters Meet explores the ways in which Western and California history and culture shaped 20th century technological developments, and his “A Tale of two Crises” in Sheila Collins’s and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg’s When Government Helped compares the American economy of the 1920s with the eve of the Great Recession.

Volker Janssen has also written peer-reviewed study texts on the Great Depression and the Sixties for the Academic Decathlon – a national high-school academic competition, is also an irregular contributor to the popular history site history.com . Janssen is a strong advocate of internships in history education, loves to help students figure out original career paths with their degrees and remains deeply involved in the improvement of graduate education on campus.

Janssen is an enthusiastic advocate of High-Impact Practices in higher-ed. That’s why he pushes diverse teamwork projects in his classroom and irregularly teaches the study abroad program in Berlin, Germany, and the DC Scholars program in the nation’s capital.

Though always passionate about history, Volker Janssen did not set out for higher education right away. Born near Frankfurt, Germany, he first dabbled into stand-up comedy and music before going abroad to work on engineering projects in London and Belize, Central America for a few years. He then worked as a newspaper editor for a small German-language newspaper in New York City before returning to Germany to attend Hamburg University and work as a reporter for the NDR, a branch of Germany’s National Public Radio. A Fulbright scholarship brought him UC San Diego in 1999, where he got hooked on archival research and decided to pursue an academic career rather than work as a journalist.

When Volker Janssen is not working, he spends time with his wife and two children, working his garden, baking bread, and recovering his guitar-skills.