UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

Profile

I am a historian of global history and the history of knowledge in the 19th and 20th century. I have particular regional expertise for East Central Europe. 

Since 2025 I am leading the Emmy Noether Group ‘Management and Planning for Development. A Transregional Perspective, 1950-1990’. It investigates the role of management knowledge and managers in development projects in state-socialist Eastern Europe and the ‘Global South’. The case studies are situated in China, the GDR, Poland and Nigeria. 

My first book "How to make microbes travel. Circulating bacteriological knowledge and Polish medicine, 1885-1939 (Mohr Siebeck 2018)" received the Hedwig Hintze Award of the VHD (Association of German Historians) and the Best Dissertation Award of the German Society for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology. It analyzes the efforts of Polish-speaking doctors and scientists to mobilize microbes  and uncovers the socio-cultural, political and, above all, the material work behind travelling knowledge. The book places East Central Europe within a global history of the modern sciences and makes us rethink the categories of center and periphery.

Main publications

• with Lukas Becht, Florian Peters and Vítězslav Sommer: Worlds of Management. Transregional Perspectives on Management Knowledge, 1945-1980. Introduction, in: Comparativ 33 (2023), H. 5/6, 589-601, 590-603. 

• Als Ameise durch die transnationale Geschichte gehen. Überlegungen zu den jeux d’échelles und Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie in einer Geschichte transnationalen Wissenstransfer, in: Marian Füssel, Tim Neu (ed.): Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie und Geschichtswissenschaft, Paderborn 2021, 169-194. 

• Epidemiological State-Building in Interwar Poland: Discourses and Paper Technologies, in: Science in Context 32 (2019), H. 1, 43-65. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889719000036

• Wie man Mikroben auf Reisen schickt. Zirkulierendes bakteriologisches Wissen und die polnische Medizin, 1885-1939, Tübingen 2018 (Mohr Siebeck).