In my dissertation, I reconstruct the history of Walter Benjamin's afterlife along the conflicts surrounding his scattered archives. (Robert Pursche)

Through the analytical lens of gender history, I approach in this study Spain’s fundamental political transformations of the 1930s and 1940s in the field of healthcare. Healthcare, particularly during the Civil War, became a battlefield, too, where competing conceptions of society were negotiated and translated into gendered practices, role expectations, and labour distribution of the medical day-to-day of the women and men. (Katharina Seibert)

This research project examines the role of British and West German women's movements in negotiating new concepts of sexuality, the body and health between 1968 and 1989. By focusing on the mechanisms of knowledge production and transformation, the project breaks with the master narrative of the 'sexual revolution' and instead highlights the different interpretative struggles around sexuality and the body within the women's movements. (Kassandra Hammel)

Between national spaces of historical enquiry on the one hand and global history on the other: What are European history’s contributions to understanding the past – and the present? What are its challenges at present, and how can they be met? (Sonja Levsen)

The project (2011-2022), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, examines the influence of different interpretations of the past and concepts of democracy on West German and French educational debates after 1945 from a comparative perspective. It questions the established narrative of supposedly specifically German "authoritarian traditions" and offers a new interpretation of the relationship between democracy and education after 1945. (Sonja Levsen)

The medical knowledge and techniques necessary to perform gender affirmative care were produced during the long 19^th century in different contexts and were not intended to serve for this purpose. This study searches for actors who reinterpreted this body of knowledge and advanced it to today’s standards. It also traces how the bodies of transgender* people became in this process an arena for negotiating the line between concepts of heterosexual feminity and masculinity as well as their subversions. (Katharina Seibert)

The project focuses on Western European magazines that have emerged from the Second Wave feminist movements since the 1970s. Information on the various magazines will be collected in a database. A website with expert contributions will combine national overviews with transnational thematic perspectives. (Kassandra Hammel & Sonja Levsen)

In my project, I am interested in a history of knowledge and the environmental history of the search for water from a trans-imperial perspective (British and German Empire, USA). Therefore, I investigate practices and forms of knowledge of the search for water, especially in imperial expansion movements since the late 19^th century and into the age of decolonization. I focus on arid regions in Southwest Africa, East Africa and the USA. (Robert Pursche)

The history of the Federal Republic of Germany is in flux. In March 2024, more than 30 historians discussed in Tübingen new developments and changing interpretations in research on the Federal Republic, asking which histories we (have to) narrate – and how we can today narrate these histories. A collected volume is in preparation. (Sonja Levsen)