Berndt Ostendorf is professor emeritus for North American History at the Amerika Institut, Ludwig Maximilians Universität München (professor between 1980 and 2005). He has written Black Literature in White America (1982) and edited Ghettoliteratur (1983), Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika 2 Vol. (1992), Die Multi­kulturelle Gesell­schaft: Mo­dell Ameri­ka? (1995), Transnational America. The Fading of Borders in the Western Hemisphere (2002) and Iconographies of Power: The Politics and Poetics of Visual Representation (2003). Areas of interest include the cultural history of immigration; the politics of ethnic difference, multiculturalism and public culture; creolization and circumatlantic Diasporas; American popular culture and the culture industry; New Orleans, Louisiana, and American music. He was a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, a long-time co-editor of Popular Music and is a founding member of CAAR. He was a board member of the Rat für Migration, a migration policy think tank, from 2000 to 2011.