One of the historical problems I am currently seeing is: how and why did an attention to difference and otherness become central to a transnational and increasingly powerful professional-managerial class? To answer this question, my current book project, Empire of American Theory and the Triumph of Neoliberalism 1965–2008, aims to historicize what I call »American Theory« in relation to neglected political and cultural contexts and hitherto unexamined sites, organs, and avenues. American Theory was a specific cultural-political movement united by an intellectual attention to difference, discontinuity, marginality, and otherness—all key to shaping democratic values and projects across the North Atlantic—that began in United States higher education and then took on international dimensions. As a Democratic Vistas postdoc fellow, I will research and write a chapter of Empire devoted to the gender dimension and other diversity aspects of American Theory, contributing to the understanding of the relationship between the (American) university and its furthering of democratic forms of life across the North Atlantic during the 1980s and 1990s. Another topic to be investigated in a projected subchapter is the historical phenomenon of and around gender theory in France. There, theories from America, a global force in higher education, have often been at the heart of polemics and legal decisions about gender. Finally, while at Democratic Vistas, I hope to research and write a subchapter on how in Germany, American theories have been at the heart of high profile and charged debates about race, gender, multiculturalism, cultural appropriation, and postcolonial theory. Generally, my research as a Democratic Vistas postdoc fellow will aim to give a much-needed historical understanding of how and why »gender« and other »diversity aspects« became not simply objects of study through and with American theoretical cognitive goods, but also political and cultural flashpoints across the North Atlantic, facilitating the formation of the university as a theater for culture war conflicts. (Gregory Jones-Katz)