Profile

Professional career

• since 04/2020
  Lecturer and Research Associate at theInstitute for Cultural Stud-ies at the University of Leipzig
• 09/2017 - 03/2020
  Scientific director, lecturer, student advisor, and coordinator of the Master's program in Gender Studies at the Center for Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Freiburg
• 12/2017 - 04/2018
  Academic lecturer at the Historical Seminar at the University of Freiburg
• 07/2015 - 01/2017
  Research assistant at the Department of History, University of Freiburg i. Br. and the project on the "History of the state ministries in Baden and Württemberg in the period of National Socialism".
• 06/2013 - 06/2015
  Teaching assistant to Prof. Dr. Sylvia Paletschek, Department of History, University of Freiburg i. Br.
• 03/2010 - 06/2013
  Research associate in the DFG project "University, Science and Humanities and its Publics. The University of Freiburg, its Humanists and Physicians (ca. 1945—70)".
• 01/2006 - 02/2010
  Research assistant at the Department of History of the University of Freiburg and the DFG Research Project History in Popular Cultures of Knowledge

Education

• 10/2017
  Doctorate (Dissertation "Elite and Crisis. Expansion and 'Self-Assertion' of the Philosophical Faculty of Freiburg 1945-67").
• 06/2008
  Graduation as Magistra Artium at the University of Freiburg (Master’s thesis "Histotainment. History on TV as a popular memory practice")
• 10/2002 - 06/2008
  Studies of Modern and Contemporary History, Political Science and Gender Studies at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg and at Trinity College Dublin

Body heat in the 'thermodynamic age' (ca. 1850-1915)

Until well into the 19th century, body heat served as a social distinguishing feature that legitimized gender, class and "race" distinctions. Women were considered cooler, men, especially proletarians, hotter. Racism was justified with climate zones, slavery and colonialism – with the argument, that BIPoC could do hard work at maximum temperatures. The project examines how these concepts and the practices based on them changed during the "thermodynamic" age. With "corporeal thermodynamics" (Rabinbach), a paradigm shift took place through which human bodies were to be precisely recorded and optimally employed to increase productivity, efficiency and growth. The "Eigensinn" of bodies and body heat, their specific needs and dynamics, was thereby ignored. The project thus focuses on everyday references to body heat, in which different regulatory processes coincided in the course of scientification, colonization, and hygienization. Starting point are perspectives "from the margins", which are decidedly included in the European historiography of the second half of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century. 

Currently, my teaching focuses on body and everyday history topics, asking especially about marginalized perspectives and groups. European contexts will be considered in their (post)colonial entanglements, biopolitical regulation processes "top-down" in relation to intersectional struggles, "Eigensinn" and social movements "bottom-up". Conceptually, we elaborate insights from everyday, postcolonial, gender, class, disability and intersectionality studies. On the basis of source analysis, we develop different methodological competencies, ranging from oral history interviews to representational and entanglement analyses to structural comparisons. The focus is on historical questions about certain developments and dynamics in relation to bodies in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

• Winter Semester 2021/22

  • DisAbilities and the Formation of Power-Dynamic Thinking at the Turn of the Century (ca. 1880-1920) (MA Seminar)
  • Colonial Climate in 19th Century Sources (BA seminar)
  • Colloquium Cultural History (with Maren Möhring and Hannes Siegrist)

• Summer Semester 2021

  • Productive Bodies in the Colonial Acclimatization Debate (MA Seminar)
  • Everyday life in the GDR from the margins (BA seminar)
  • Colloquium Cultural History (with Maren Möhring and Hannes Siegrist)
  • Workshop "University History in the 19th and 20th Century" March 18/19, 2020 (with Miriam Bräuer and Sylvia Paletschek)

  
  

• Winter Semester 2020/21

  • Perspectives "from the margins" on European body practices (MA seminar)
  • Corporal Self-Determination in Transition (BA Seminar)
  • Colloquium Cultural History (together with Maren Möhring and Hannes Siegrist)
  • Organization, Moderation and Introduction to the Lecture Series Entangled Inequalities in Historical Perspective (with Marie Muschalek and Mirjam Höfner)

• Summer Semester 2020

  • Body Heat in the Process of Marginalization? Bathing Cultures in the 19th Century (MA seminar);
  • Bodies in Everyday Life. An introduction (BA seminar)

• Winter Semester 2019/20

  • Reconstructive methods and group discussions. Climate of Travel, Climate for Traveling (MA seminar with Nina Degele);
  • Theories of Gender Studies (MA-Seminar with M. Mangelsdorf)
  • Organization, moderation and introduction to the lecture series Cultural and Social History of Gender
  • Introduction to methods of modern and contemporary history in the context of the Methodological Seminar of Interdisciplinary Anthropology (MA) 
  • Research Colloquium Gender Studies

• Summer Semester 2019

  • Intellectuals and POP in the 1990s (MA Seminar)
  • Research Colloquium Gender Studies 

• Winter Semester 2018/19

  • Theories of Gender Studies (MA-Seminar with M. Mangelsdorf)
  • Organization, moderation and introduction to the lecture series Cultural and Social History of Gender
  • Research Colloquium Gender Studies 

  
  

• Summer Semester 2018

  • Sex Work in the 19th Century (Proseminar with tutorial)
  • Social Change from Gender, Queer, Intersectional and Posthuman Perspectives (Seminar)     
  • Research Colloquium Gender Studies