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Jun.-Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Piller

University of Freiburg
History

Internal Fellow (FRIAS Project Group)
October 2024 – September 2025

E-Mail: Elisabeth.piller@geschichte.uni-freiburg.de

Last Update: 08.11.2024

Curriculum Vitae

Elisabeth Piller is Assistant Professor of Transatlantic and North American History at the Department of History, University of Freiburg. Her research focuses on American foreign policy and the relationship between the United States and Europe since the late 19th century. Her first book, Selling Weimar. German Public Diplomacy and the United States, 1918-1933 (published in 2021), examined the Weimar Republic’s courtship of the United States in the interwar period and showed the US to be a determining factor in German and European foreign policy of the interwar period. Her current research project, The Good Samaritan of all the World—US Humanitarians, Postwar Europe and the Making of the American Century, focuses on American humanitarian aid after the Second World War and traces the rise of the United States as a (humanitarian) superpower. The major aid programs of the post-war period are seen not only as a prelude to, or sideshow to, the Marshall Plan, but also as a laboratory for new ideas about American food power, first developed in Europe and then extended globally.

Selected Publications

FRIAS Project