Interim Professor for Modern History Dr. Lasse Heerten

Lasse Heerten is the interim professor for modern history at the University of Heidelberg in the winter semester 2025/2026. In July of 2025 he submitted his Habilitation thesis “Wasser und Stein. Hamburger, der Hafen und die Elbe im Zeitalter globaler Imperien” [Water and Stone: Hamburg, its Port, and the River Elbe in the Age of Global Empires] at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. He laid the basis for his thesis with the project “Imperial Gateway: Hamburg, Imperial Germany and the Making of a Global Port” (DFG). After studying in, among other places, Paris, Oxford and Berlin, he received his doctorate at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2014 (summa cum laude). He revised his dissertation for publication as a book during a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Human Rights at the University of California at Berkeley. The book was published in 2017 by Cambridge University (paperback 2019).

As a historian of modern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, he has a keen interest in Atlantic, global and planetary entanglements, and has contributed to diverse fields of study. His interests include the history of port cities and oceanic history, transimperial history and the history of empires, studies of the Anthropocene from a historical perspective, the history of human rights and humanitarianism, conceptual and visual history, comparative studies of protests, the history of international order, and the global history of Holocaust memory and comparisons. His work on these subjects has been published in journals including the American Historical Review, Central European History, Geschichte und Gesellschaft and the Journal of Genocide Research.