Volker Janssen, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Department of History

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Brief biography: Born and raised near Frankfurt, Germany, Volker Janssen received his B.A. from the University of Hamburg and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. The title of his Ph.D. dissertation was "Convict Labor, Civic Welfare: Rehabilitation in California's Prisons, 1941-1971." His article "From the Inside Out: Therapeutic Penology, Labor, and Citizenship in the Context of Postwar Liberalism" appeared in the summer 2007 issue of Osiris, the history of science journal of the University of Chicago Press.

Professor Janssen specializes in the social, economic, and institutional history of California, and is has recently developed a new interest in the history of technology. During the 07/08 and 08/09 academic years he will be on assignment as a postdoctoral fellow at the USC-Huntington Institute for California and the West, teaching select courses at the University of Southern California Campus and revising his dissertation for publication at the Huntington Library in San Marino.

Professor Janssen is a member of Germany's advanced studies foundation "Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes" and a 1999/2000 Fulbright Scholar. Before he taught at the University of California, San Diego, he worked as a radio reporter in Hamburg and as a news editor in New York City. Prior to that, he worked as an engineering project administrator in Belize and London