Current Project

• History of colonialism
• History of environment
• Entangled history and history of transfer in the 19th and 20th century
• History of religion and mission
• History of the future
• History of gender

Current project

Scaling Space and Time. The Production of Global Climate Knowledge in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Knowledge about climate, about anthropogenic climate change and its effects on the environment shapes contemporary debates. However, what exactly was understood by climate when, and by whom, has changed considerably over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Climate was not only an important topic of scientific debate, but also part of political, economic, colonial, and medical discourses as well as of bourgeois conversation. Climate was used to organize notions of time, past as well as future, and space. The habilitation project, which is situated at the intersection of knowledge and media history, starts here and examines the changes, shifts, and narrowing of knowledge about climate (change) in the period between ca. 1800 and ca. 1970. Using exemplarily selected case studies, the study therefore wants to pursue questions about the emergence, mediation, and dissemination of the various interwoven aspects of climate knowledge. Three perspectives are guiding the study: First, the medial production and distribution practices, logics and conditions of climate knowledge will be investigated; second, the different dimensions of climate knowledge with and beyond the purely scientific dimension will be explored. Third, climate knowledge will be understood as an approach to ordering processes of space and time; first, how orders of time are challenged by the preoccupation with climate will be examined; second, the conditions of construction under which climate knowledge enabled scalings between the local, regional, and global will be explored.

Mission as a theological laboratory. Negatiations of religion at the end of the nineteenth century

Using the work of the Leipzig missionary society in the Kilimanjaro area around 1900 as an example, the projects analyses negotiations of religion and Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century. In a post-secular perspective on religion, neither religion nor Christianity are understood as definitive objects, but merely as a concept, which is continuously negotiated. The project, therefore, asks, how religion and in a second step Christianity were perceived, how the religious and the secular fields were separated, how spiritual knowledge was produced and used in the mission field as well as in the German Kaiserreich. Combining microhistorical and discourse analytical perspectives, the study argues that in theological and religious debates, which took place in the German Kaiserreich, experiences in the mission field and negotiations of religion and Christianity were used as arguments in discourses on religion, modernity and the church. Hence, the mission became in these debates a theological laboratory.