Chair of Modern History Research

The Chair for Modern History stands for a cultural and social history of the “long 19th century”—the period spanning from the late 1700s to the mid-1900s, with thematic emphases in the history of science and knowledge, in environmental and material histories, and in the history of disease and the body. Generally, the team stands for a geographically expansive ‘global’ history, with an emphasis both on the theory and method of global history as well as some of the field’s fundamental themes, including migration, mobility, and exile.

A wide range of postdoctoral and doctoral research projects are based at the Chair, engaging with an array of topics: from the history of reading during ocean voyages and transnational pilgrimage under National Socialism, to the history of applied entomology, early pesticide criticism, and biological forms of “pest control.” Other projects explore the bodily history of female aging in Victorian Britain, the lived experiences and medical conditions of enslaved persons in the French Caribbean, the technological history of iron shipbuilding, and the production of knowledge in Guatemalan plantation economies.