Professur für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Simon Stewner M.A.
contact
Simon Stewner M.A.
SFB 1671
Department of History
Heidelberg University
Grabengasse 3-5
69117 Heidelberg
academic positions
Since 02/2025
Research Associate (Doctoral Candidate)
Collaborative Research Centre 1671 “Home(s): Phenomena, Practices, Representations”
Heidelberg University / Philipps University Marburg
09/2024 – 11/2025
Research Associate
Coordination Office for Academic Collections / University Museum Heidelberg
06/2024 – 08/2024
Intern
Corporate Archive, Heidelberg Materials AG
education
M.A. in Global History
Heidelberg University, 10/2020 – 03/2024
B.A. in History and Political Science
Heidelberg University, 10/2016 – 09/2020
Research Project (PhD Dissertation)
Home Within and Without: A History of Psychiatry in the Early Twentieth Century
This dissertation explores experiences of belonging among psychiatric patients between 1900 and the 1930s through the analytical lens of “homemaking” (Beheimatung). It investigates how individuals categorized as “abnormal” experienced and actively constructed forms of belonging, while also shedding light on broader societal conceptions of normality and inclusion. The concept of homemaking is understood not as a fixed condition but as a dynamic process of becoming and losing a sense of home.
The project develops an alternative history of early twentieth-century psychiatry. It first examines how medical professionals conceptualized psychiatric institutions as spaces of belonging, asking to what extent they were designed as “homely” or “comfortable” environments and how these ideals varied across institutional types.
A second focus lies on patients’ own practices of (re-)homemaking. These include strategies such as remembering, writing, drawing, and working, encompassing both the appropriation of institutional spaces and the creation of imagined forms of belonging. Particular attention is given to mobile patients (so-called “vagrants”), whose experiences offer new perspectives on homemaking beyond sedentary frameworks.
The study is based on a wide range of sources, including contemporary medical literature, patient records, and institutional archives, as well as artworks and writings by patient-artists from the Prinzhorn Collection.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Maike Rotzoll; Prof. Dr. Katja Patzel-Mattern
Vorträge
Table
(with Maike Rotzoll and Linnéa Kluge) Between Old and New Homes: Artistic Homemaking among Psychiatric Patients around 1900 Archive Day, University Archive Heidelberg, 7 March 2026. |
Memories of a Lost Home: Interwoven Imaginaries in the Work of Peter Mikolajewski (1885–1941) Congress of the German Society for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics and Neurology, 28 November 2025 |
Homemaking at the Border? Psychiatry, Modernity, and Mobility in Austrian-Slovenian Styria (1900–1933) Colloquium in East European History, Justus Liebig University Giessen, 18 November 2025 |
Publikationen
Table
Stewner, Simon; Giovannini, Norbert. Weber and Impact: On the Reception of Max Weber in Heidelberg. Heidelberg: Yearbook on the History of the City, 2024 (28), pp. 287–290. |
Stewner, Simon; Runde, Ingo. Exhibition and Archival Records on Emil Julius Gumbel in the University Archive Heidelberg. In: Emil Julius Gumbel: Mathematician – Publicist – Pacifist, Heidelberg 2022, pp. 189–198. |
Stewner, Simon. On the Emil Julius Gumbel Conference at the University Archive Heidelberg (22 July 2019). Heidelberg: Yearbook on the History of the City, 2020 (24), pp. 253–258. |
Stewner, Simon. Jaspers and Gumbel in Heidelberg: The Philosopher and the Outsider. New Year’s Publication of the Friends of the University Archive and Museum Heidelberg, 2020. |
teaching experience
Winter Semester 2025/26
Art, Madness, Past: Methods in the History of Psychiatry
Seminar, Heidelberg University (co-taught with Linnéa Kluge)
Summer Semester 2025
Only Old White Men? Representations of University History in the University Museum Heidelberg
Excursion course, Heidelberg University