Global Family History: The Kaundinyas between Protestant Mission and European Colonialism, 1850-1945

The study of the German-Indian-British Kaundinya family in the period between 1850 and 1945 links the history of the Protestant mission with European colonialism and contributes to the growing field of global family history. The legacy of the extensive correspondence of women, men and children from three generations allows us to reconstruct the modes of construction of a family living in trans-imperial settings, to make visible its changing ethnic affiliations and to trace its history until the time of National Socialism.

(2020-2022; supported by the DFG), edited by Sandra Maß/Johanna Mues

Ongoing, monograph in progress.

Clio Contaminated? History in the Anthropocene

A new and productive buzzword is born, which is currently leading to considerable interdisciplinary debate in anthropology, archaeology, history, geography and geology: the Anthropocene. The depth and scope of what is at stake in this debate manifests itself in what looks like a complete reversal of assumptions about the importance of the human actor. While in geology mankind for the first time is represented as an epoch-making force, in historical science for the first time inanimate objects and animals are attributed with agency.

The project Clio Contaminated? is conceived as an interdisciplinary exploration and analysis of this puzzling new predicament. It takes the initial irritation concerning the questioning of the boundaries between the disciplines that study nature and culture as a starting point for a further inquiry concerning the future of a truly interdisciplinary historical science. It takes the irreducible polyphony of history seriously and seeks stories in which mosaics, textures and contaminations become visible. The idea of contamination refers to both the ‘surplus value’ of interdisciplinary approaches and to the analytical frame of reference. Envisioned is by no means a ‘new avant-garde’ or a modified environmental history, but rather a historical science that places chains of events with different scales, poly-focal perspectives and different units of investigation (people, artefacts, nature, resources) in an overall historical context.

funded by the VolkswagenStiftung Originalitätsverdacht (2021-2022)

The monograph Zukünftige Vergangenheiten. Geschichte schreiben im Anthropozän was published in 2024 by Wallstein Verlag.

Water and Stone: The Port of Hamburg in the Age of Global Empires

The habilitation builds on the project Tor zur Welt. Der Hamburger Hafen und das Kaiserreich (DFG, project number 278804377), which was conducted at Freie Universität Berlin from 2015 to 2019 and has since been continued at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. In this study, I examine the Port of Hamburg in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Combining urban and global historical perspectives, I develop three distinctly historical contributions within an interdisciplinary framework.

First, I analyze the significance of port cities for the globality of the steam age, whose core phase coincides with the ‚first globalization‘ and the High Modernity. As I argue, never before or after were globality and urbanity as closely intertwined as in the expanding port cities in the decades before World War I, when ports were the central sites of global entanglements, serving both as workplaces for the masses and transit hubs for those passing through.

Second, I seek to overcome the historiographical separation between Hamburg and the German Empire. Hamburg has long been considered a liberal-cosmopolitan enclave – „a special case in German history“ (Percy Ernst Schramm) – and thus distanced from the German ‚Sonderweg‘. The legacies of this debate continue to shape research. Hamburg is still often conceived as an entity distinct from the German Empire, which is primarily understood as „Prussian“ and as something that needed to be integrated into the Reich. However, to understand the German Empire as a global empire, Hamburg, as the continent’s most important port and commercial metropolis, must be seen as an integral part of imperial policy.

Third, I aim to contribute to current debates on capitalism and the Anthropocene from a historical perspective. The port is a place designed and continuously expanded to facilitate the smooth transport of nature transformed into commodities. The Elbe was turned into a thoroughfare – both imaginatively and physically. In this abstracting logic of acceleration and expansion, the natural environment of the river, the origins of the goods, and the social entanglements of the workers were all disregarded. Yet, these entanglements continuously generated unintended side effects, creating persistent challenges for the port economy.