Joe's book, Free-Market Socialists: European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1968 is to be released later this year.
Joseph Malherek
Department of American StudiesGeorge Washington University
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NEH Postdoctoral Fellow
From Bauhaus to Maxwell House: Continental Design and Social Science as Technologies of Consumer Engineering in Twentieth-Century America
2015-2016 NEH Postdoctoral Fellow This project will examine the ways in which social science methods and industrial design techniques have been employed by American businesses as tools for increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of their consumer marketing practices. I posit that, in the commercial-Keynesian economy, design produced an unconscious, emotional relationship between industry and consumers. Design itself became a veritable technology of “consumer engineering,” to use the 1930 coinage of adman Earnest Elmo Calkins. My research examines the dynamic relationship between the corporate developers of new technologies, such as Du Pont and General Motors, and the often immigrant designers and social scientists who helped those companies engage with their consumer markets, such as the French industrial designer Raymond Loewy, the German graphic artist Walter Landor, and the Austrian psychologist Ernest Dichter. The individual subjects of this project were part of an “intellectual migration” that included prominent émigrés in a variety of fields, but because these figures worked in marketing and design, their contributions to the consumer culture intimately affected the daily experience of millions of Americans. Research at Consortium archives, particularly the Hagley Museum and Library, Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Smithsonian’s Archives Center at the National Museum of American History, will be essential to probe the European origins of twentieth-century American consumer culture.
Updates
Joseph Malherek
Joseph Malherek
Joseph Malherek has a publication contract from Central European University Press for his manuscript (title subject to change), "The Frankfurt School’s Other: Socialist Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1956."
Joseph Malherek
In 2020, Joe published Between Making and Knowing: Tools in the History of Materials Research, coedited with Cyrus Mody; his article “The Simple and Courageous Course: Industrial Patronage of Basic Research at the University of Chicago, 1945–1953” appeared in the December issue of Isis; and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
Joseph Malherek
Joseph will be a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Advance Study at Central European University in Budapest for the 2019-202 academic year. He also recently published "Shopping Malls and Social Democracy: Victor Gruen's Postwar Campaign for Conscientious Consumption in American Suburbia," in Consumer Engineering, 1920s-1970s: Marketing between Expert Planning and Consumer Responsiveness, eds. Jan Logemann, Gary Cross and Ingo Köhler.
Joseph Malherek
Joseph authored a chapter in an edited volume: "Shopping Malls and Social Democracy: Victor Gruen’s Postwar Campaign for Conscientious Consumption in American Suburbia,” in Consumer Engineering, 1930–1970: Marketing from Planning Euphoria to the Limits of Growth, eds. Gary Cross, Ingo Köhler, and Jan Logemann. Publication is scheduled for later in 2018.
Joseph Malherek
will be the Fulbright-Botstiber Visiting Professor of Austrian-American Studies at the University of Vienna. Joe also recently published “From the Ringstraße to Madison Avenue: Commercial Market Research and the Viennese Origins of the Mass Culture Debate, 1941–1961,” Canadian Review of American Studies 47 (2017): 261–87.
Joseph Malherek
Three of Malherek's papers were recently accepted for publication and are slated to appear in 2016: "Shopping Malls and Social Democracy: Victor Gruen's Postwar Campaign for Conscientious Consumption in American Suburbia" in Consumer Engineering: Marketing between Planning Euphoria and the Limits of Growth, 1930s to 1970s, eds. Gary Cross, Ingo Köhler, and Jan Logemann; "Victor Gruen's Retail Therapy: Exiled Jewish Communities and the Invention of the American Shopping Mall as a Postwar Ideal," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book; and "From the Ringstraße to Madison Avenue: Commercial Market Research and the Viennese Origins of the Mass Culture Debate, 1941-1961," Canadian Review of American Studies.