Teresa Göltl, M. Ed.
Contact
Teresa Göltl, M. Ed.
Hauptstraße 113
Second floor, room 226
D-69117 Heidelberg
Tel.: +49 (0) 6221 / 54 - 37702
E-mail: teresa.goeltl@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de
Office hours: by appointment
Teresa Göltl is a historian specializing in the history of slavery and the history of law and medicine in the Atlantic world of the 18th and 19th centuries. Since completing her Master of Education in History, French and Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, she has been working on her doctorate as part of a Franco-German cotutelle at the University of Heidelberg and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. From 2022 to 2024, Teresa Göltl worked as a research assistant at the Chair of Early Modern History at Heidelberg University. In this role, she supervised international exchange programs such as Erasmus and Elan and taught seminars on the history of slavery in the Atlantic and German-speaking regions as well as on revolutions and human rights in the 18th and 19th centuries. In September 2024, she joined the ERC project “Fever: Global Histories of (a) Disease, 1750-1840”.
Research
Teresa Göltl's dissertation project is located at the intersection of slavery, legal and medical history in the French colonies of the 19th century. The focus is on court proceedings against enslavers who were accused of mistreating, neglecting and/or killing enslaved persons. The aim of the dissertation is to systematically record and categorize these trials for the period from 1828 to 1848 and to analyse them with regard to colonial jurisprudence, public health policy and abolitionist debates. She is particularly interested in the role that enslaved bodies played in these proceedings: as objects of judicial, medical and moral evaluation, but also as active witnesses whose testimonies were publicly received. The cases, which received a great deal of media attention and were documented in the Gazette Officielle de la Guadeloupe and the Gazette des Tribunaux in Paris, among others, open up new perspectives on colonial systems of order.
They show how closely medical discourses on care, pathologization and the “duty to treat” were interwoven with legal discourses. In the surviving reports and court records, enslaved people appear not only as objects of colonial violence, but also as legal subjects who formulated claims to care and justice. When these sources are viewed from a medical-historical perspective, previously hidden aspects come to light: it becomes clear how enslaved people applied medical knowledge, for example to reduce fever, refused medical care in so-called plantation hospitals and deliberately disclosed their physical condition to colonial officials in order to initiate legal proceedings. The analysis of these processes thus makes it possible to rethink the scope of action, colonial control mechanisms and the social and symbolic meanings of bodies in slavery.
