Geschlechtergeschichte
Research
- Gender history and Gender theory
- European history since Early Modernity
- Theories and methods of history
- Migration history
- History of science / humanities
- Postcolonial theory
PhD theses
We are supervising dissertations on history from the 16th to the 21st century, especially those focusing on historical gender relations, migration history, intersectionality and social inequalities, history of science, biographical research, and queer history.
Please use this cover sheet for your dissertation.
Current PhD projects
- Carla-Maëlys Barboutie: “Qui que tu sois, sang-mêlé, mercenaire, Latin, Saxon, repu ou déclassé”: Sociohistoire des légionnaires, acteurs des guerres coloniales (1831-1914) [“Whoever you are, half-blood, mercenary, Latin, Saxon, reputed or déclassé”: A social history of the French Foreign legionnaires, players in the colonial wars (1831-1914)], (Université Grenoble Alpes)
- Franziska Jutta Völlner: Doing Heimat. Beheimatungsstrategien und -prozesse von FluchtMigrantinnen in Vorarlberg [Doing Heimat. Strategies and processes of belonging by female refugee migrants in Vorarlberg], (University of Innsbruck)
Current Research Projects
Narratives of Foreignness and Belonging: Migration as a Discursive Process in Western European Border Regions (1815-1871)
Levke Harders; funded by the German Research Foundation (2016-21).
Blog on the research project: Migration & Belonging
Migration was already a common component of society in the early 19th century, but it was only with the concept of the nation-state that it came to be perceived as a significant challenge. The project thus takes a fresh look at inner-European migration between 1815 und 1871, how it was regulated, at exclusion and inclusion and the actors involved in these processes. It conceives of the production of alterity and belonging as a process in order to explore the homogenization and modernization of society as well as nation-building. To this end, the study undertakes a contrasting analysis of state practices surrounding migration as well as the motivations and behaviors of mobile people. With a regional focus on Alsace, Schleswig and Holstein, the study emphasizes the diversity of actors in Migration processes on the one hand and the particular significance of border regions on the other.
European maps at the end of the Early Modern Period. Techniques of construction
Muriel González Athenas: funded by the German Research Foundation
In the current debate on Europe, triggered in part by the economic and political crisis, the European Union is described or at least postulated as a community of values and a unified legal and economic space, based on a geography of the “European continent” that is understood as a spatial unit and is rarely questioned. This geographical unity or its cartographic production is at the centre of interest in this research project. On the one hand, the projects aims at analysing the politics and techniques of producing Europe as a spatial unit; on the other hand, it takes a look at the map as a product of everyday interaction and interconnectedness. The hypothesis of the project is that between 1700 and 1860 in Western Europe a specifically geographical spatialisation of the horizon of thought and perception took hold. This was expressed in the production and interpretation of maps - and that these new graphic products or media powerfully intervened in the reception of Eurocentric ideas of space, or produced them in the first place. The source corpus (map collections of the state libraries in Munich and Berlin, the research libraries in Gotha/Erfurt, Paris and Vienna) is selected in such a way as to capture both the materiality of spatiality through the analysis of the maps and atlases themselves, and the prevailing images of Europe in terms of experiential space through the commentaries and letters of the editorial process between cartographers and publishers. This materiality has already been examined to some extent in the historical geography of Europe, but without addressing the mutability of ideas of space. In this way, the relationship between maps, knowledge and power can be examined and historicised. It is a matter of answering questions about the production and establishment of Europe as a world region, its hegemonic positioning in a global spatial order of "centre" and "periphery", and its history of entanglement in relation to ideas of space