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 handed in his habilitation thesis “Wasser und Stein. Hamburger, der Hafen und die Elbe im Zeitalter globaler Imperien” at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where he worked since 2019. The basis for his thesis was the project “Tor zur Welt: Der Hamburger Hafen und das Kaiserreich” (DFG). After his studies in Paris, Oxford and Berlin, he received his doctorate at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2014 with summa cum laude. He edited his dissertation for publication as a postdoctoral fellow in human Rights at the University of Califernia at Berkeley the same year. It was published in 2017 by Cambridge University and has been available as a paperback since 2019.

As a historian of imperial, global and (post-)colonial entaglements in modern Europe with additional expertise in subsaharan Africa, North America and the Atlantic, he has contributed to diverse fields of studies. His interests include the history of port cities and oceanic history, transimperial history, the anthropocene from a historical perspective, the history of human rights and humanitarianism, comparative studies of protests, the postcolonial international order as well as the memory of the holocaust from a global perspective. His articles on these subjects have been published in (among others) the American Historical Review, Central European History, Geschichte und Gesellschaft and the Journal of Genocide Research.