19 September 2025 —12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Jana Weiss (UT Germanic Studies)

“Barrels of Knowledge: The Transatlantic Circulation of Scientific Brewing in 19th-Century America”

Jana Weiss writes:

This talk presents a draft chapter from my second book, focusing on the lager
beer revolution in the United States. Brewing is one of the oldest and most
widely used technologies. Many of its key discoveries took decades, some even
hundreds of years. The nineteenth century was the Belle Époque of brewing
professionalization as the sharing of beer practices evolved from (informal)
personal experience and sometimes clandestine exchanges to an open knowledge
transfer, primarily through trade journals and formal training.During this
time, German Americans took over the U.S. beer industry. As brewers and
brewing scientists transferred European technologies and skills across the
Atlantic, they eventually (re)invented a new beer style, American-style lager,
though not without setbacks. My presentation zooms in on the role of the
United States Brewers Association and its flagship publication, Der
Amerikanische Bierbrauer, in disseminating scientific advances but also
failures.
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Jana Weiss is DAAD Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
She focuses on U.S. and transatlantic history, in particular immigration,
racism, knowledge, and religious history. After studying at the University of
Bremen, she received her PhD in 2013 at the University of Münster with a study
on the role of civil religion in U.S.-American patriotic holidays after 1945
(Fly the Flag and Give Thanks to God. Zivilreligion an US-amerikanischen
patriotischen Feiertagen, 1945-1992, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015).
Jana is currently working on her second book titled A Lager Beer Revolution:
German American Brewers in Pre-Prohibition USA, analyzing the cultural and
technological transfer of the “German art of brewing” to the United States.
Her research has been generously funded by the German Research Foundation
(DFG), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the German Historical
Institute in Washington, D.C.

5 September 2025 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

John Handel (Baylor University)

“Finance at Telegraphic Speed: Infrastructure, Politics, and the Material Limits of Global Finance, 1840s–1920s”

The telegraph is often seen as one of the most important technological innovations that helped usher in an age of global financial integration during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For the first time in history, information and capital moved at electronic speeds, enabling unprecedented capital flows across space. But this framework typically adopts both a technologically deterministic understanding of the telegraph and uses only long-run, macroeconomic approaches to measure the financial effects of the telegraph. This paper instead focuses on the practicalities of operationalizing the telegraph within the financial system. How was the telegraphic infrastructure that linked financial markets built, implemented, and maintained? By focusing on the telegraph’s infrastructural operation, this paper argues that, rather than being driven by efficiency and speed, financial telegraphy was more profoundly shaped by its material limitations. The limitations of financial telegraphy then inaugurated sharp conflicts between states, markets, and firms to capture the relatively small efficiency gains telegraphy brought. These conflicts took place deep within the technical infrastructure of the global telegraphic system and seemingly small technicalities like the management of electric current, the maintenance of wires, the adoption of new telegraph apparatuses, and message delivery systems became the key sites within which a new global political economy of finance was forged.

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John Handel is an assistant professor of history at Baylor University where he teaches economic and financial history and the history of Modern Europe, especially Britain and its Empire. He received his PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley. Before arriving at Baylor he was a post-doctoral fellow in the finance department at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. His first book, The Infrastructures of Finance: The London Stock Exchange and the Making of the Modern Financial System 1801-1914, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.