About Paul Lerner

I teach in the History Department at The University of Southern California, primarily courses on German and European history, with specializations on fascism, the history of medicine, consumer culture, and Jewish history. I have been at USC since 1997, after spending 18 months as a postdoc at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London and after graduate school in history at Columbia. My current book project is called "Exiles on Main Street: Central European Émigrés, American Capitalism, and Cold War Consumer Culture, 1940-1970," and is about the American household/housewife as a site of intervention for émigré experts (architects, psychologists, advertising professionals, psychiatrists, etc.) who fled Nazi controlled Europe for the safe shores of the US where they encountered a booming economy and a robust consumer sphere. Previous books and articles concern the history of the "Jewish department store" in pre-Nazi Germany (The Consuming Temple), shell shock and the history of German psychiatry (Hysterical Men), and German Jewish masculinity (Jewish Masculinities). I've recently written about the German TV hit Babylon Berlin, Lion Feuchtwanger as Jewish writer, etc.