I am a historian of modern Western Europe and sub-Saharan Africa with a particular interest in Atlantic, global, and planetary entanglements. Within these contexts, I am particularly interested in the history of politics, conceptual and visual history, and the histories of cities, environments, and capitalism. I have recently finished my Habilitation titled Wasser und Stein. Hamburg, der Hafen und die Elbe im Zeitalter globaler Imperien (“Water and Stone: Hamburg, its Port, and the River Elbe in the Age of Global Empires”). I started my work on this subject as PI of the project Imperial Gateway: Hamburg, the German Empire, and the Making of a Global Port, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The study contributes to the historiography of port cities, to scholarship on the German Empire and transimperial entanglements, and to debates about the Anthropocene.

After studying in, among other places, Paris, Oxford and Berlin, I wrote my first book (based on my doctoral thesis at Freie Universität Berlin 2014; summa cum laude) on the global history of the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) and the humanitarian crisis in the short-lived Republic of Biafra. I studied how a Third World conflict that had initially been of marginal international interest, became a global media and protest event when the famine in the landlocked secessionist enclave of Biafra aroused concern among publics around the globe. With my research, I have contributed to several much-discussed fields of study, notably the histories of human rights and humanitarianism, of postcolonial international order, of the protests of the 1960s, and the global history of Holocaust memory and Holocaust comparisons. I revised the manuscript for publication as a monograph during a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Human Rights at the University of California at Berkeley. The book was published with Cambridge University Press in 2017, and as a paperback in 2019.

Lasse Heerten: An Imperial Adventus into a City of Warehouses: History, Modernity, and Urbanity in the Symbolic and Material Construction of Hamburg’s Free Port, in: Central European History 57 (2024), Heft 3, S. 311-337.

Lasse Heerten: Biafras of the Mind. French Postcolonial Humanitarianism in Global Conceptual History, in: The American Historical Review 126 (2021), Heft 4, S. 1448-1484.

Lasse Heerten: Der Biafra-Krieg als globales Medien- und Protestereignis, in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 71 (2021), Nr. 32-33, S. 28-33.

Lasse Heerten: Mooring Mobilities, Fixing Flows: Towards a Global Urban History of Port Cities in the Age of Steam, in: Journal of Historical Sociology 34 (2021), Heft 2, S. 350-374.

Lasse Heerten: Anti-Slavery and Indentured Labor in the Age of Global Empire, in: Humanity. An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 11 (2020), Nr. 3, S. 352-369.

Lasse Heerten, Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps, Arua Oko Omaka, Kevin O’Sullivan, Bertrand Taithe: Roundtable: Biafra, Humanitarian Intervention and History, in: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 2 (2020), Heft 2, S. 66-78.

Lasse Heerten: The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism. Spectacles of Suffering, Cambridge 2017 (Taschenbuchausgabe 2019).

Lasse Heerten, Dirk Moses (Hgg.): Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide. The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967-1970, Abingdon 2018.

Lasse Heerten: Die Vernetzung der Welt. Maritime Globalisierungen, in: Deutsches Historisches Museum (Hg.): Europa und das Meer, München 2018, S. 89-97.

Lasse Heerten, Dirk Moses: The Nigeria-Biafra War. Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide, in: dies. (Hg.): Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide. The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967-1970, Abingdon 2018, S. 3-43.

Lasse Heerten: Ankerpunkte der Verflechtung. Hafenstädte in der neueren Globalgeschichtsschreibung, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 43 (2017), Heft 1, S. 146-175.

Lasse Heerten: Menschenrechte und Neue Menschenrechtsgeschichte, Version: 1.0, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 31. Januar 2017.

Lasse Heerten: ‚A‘ as in Auschwitz, ‚B‘ as in Biafra. The Nigerian Civil War, Visual Narratives of Genocide, and the Fragmented Universalization of the Holocaust, in: Heide Fehrenbach, Davide Rodogno (Hgg.): Humanitarian Photography. A History, New York 2015, S. 249-274.

Lasse Heerten, Dirk Moses: The Nigeria-Biafra War. Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide, in: Journal of Genocide Research 16 (2014), Heft 2-3, S. 169-203.

Lasse Heerten: The Dystopia of Postcolonial Catastrophe. Self-Determination, the Biafran War of Secession and the 1970s Human Rights Moment, in: Jan Eckel, Samuel Moyn (Hgg.): The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s, Philadelphia 2013, S. 15-32.

Lasse Heerten: Die Dystopie postkolonialer Katastrophen. Das Recht auf Selbstbestimmung, der biafranische Sezessionskrieg und die Menschenrechte, in: Jan Eckel, Samuel Moyn (Hgg.): Moral für die Welt? Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren, Göttingen 2012, S. 68-99.

Lasse Heerten: A wie Auschwitz, B wie Biafra. Der Bürgerkrieg in Nigeria (1967–1970) und die Universalisierung des Holocaust, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen 8 (2011), Heft 3, S. 394-413.

Lasse Heerten: Léopold Sédar Senghor als Subjekt der ‚Dialektik des Kolonialismus‘. Ein Denker Afrikas und die imperiale Metropole, in: Stichproben. Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien 15 (2008), Heft 2, S. 87-116.