Institute of Modern History

Dr. Austin Collins

I am a historian of early modern European history, with a specialisation in urban, religious, and spatial approaches. My research investigates how monarchical and religious influence interacted with civic authority within urban spaces during the early French Wars of Religion. My current book project, based on my doctoral dissertation and provisionally entitled ‘‘La ville eut l’éphémère honneur d’être comme la capitale du Royaume': A Spatial History of Charles IX’s Royal Tour of France, 1564–1566 (Angoulême, Lyon, Sens)’, explores how royal, civic, and religious actors utilized different urban spaces in France to project their own authority and promote religious toleration and co-existence through royal entrances amid religious warfare. My research incorporates primary source material such as festival books, financial records, correspondences, city council minutes, and maps. Prior to Tübingen, I have taught early modern European seminars at Durham University.


Dr. Carmen Channing

I am a historian of the Americas in the early modern period. I have a MSt in History from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaiso, Chile and a PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh, UK. As a Latin American and Chilean researcher, I am interested in the connections between America and Europe and the fabric of those connections. More specifically, I focus on those territories that were seen by Europe as "peripheries" and their relationship with the "centre". My doctoral thesis, "Imagined peripheries: English visions of Patagonia (1527-1694)" challenges the assumption that "peripheries", such as Patagonia, did not have a major impact on the way early modern empires conceived their expansion. On the contrary, Patagonia activated England's imagination of the Americas and the colonial opportunities that existed in the South Sea. My areas of interest are maritime history, cultural history, imagined geographies and most recently in the history of science. My research project for T@T, "The South Sea in the Scientific Revolution: Global connections, cultural encounters, colonial science and networks of knowledge (1600-1700)", aims to study how the interactions between European and South Sea societies gave rise to novel and local forms of science -“colonial science”- in the early modern period. I firmly believe that academic research goes hand in hand with teaching. In Chile, I was a tutor for the History of Latin America I and II (1500-1700)  and in Edinburgh I was a tutor for Early Modern History: A Connected World and The Historian's Toolkit. Now at Tuebingen I will be teaching "Imagined Geographies" and "Colonial Science".