Jan C. Jansen is Professor of Modern History (19th–20th Centuries) at the University of Tübingen. Prior to joining the University of Tübingen, he was Assistant/Associate Professor of Global History of Mobility (18th–20th Centuries) at the University of Duisburg-Essen and a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. In the past years, Jan also held research and lecturer positions at the George Washington University, Georgetown University, the University of Konstanz, the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC) in Tunis, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London.
Jan’s main research interests concern the comparative history of the European colonial empires and decolonization with a particular focus on North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic World. He is the author of Erobern und Erinnern: Symbolpolitik, öffentlicher Raum und französischer Kolonialismus in Algerien 1830–1950 (2013) and co-author, with Jürgen Osterhammel, of Kolonialismus: Geschichte, Formen, Folgen (2012) and of Decolonization: A short history (co-authored with Jürgen Osterhammel, Princeton University Press, 2017). His current research concerns the history of refugee movements during the age of revolutions (1780s–1820s) and their broader impact on the transformation of the Atlantic world. His two book projects are about the transformations of concepts and legal notions of alienness and subjecthood during the revolutionary era and about the emergence of exile as a trans-imperial political space.
Jan is Principal Investigator of the project "Atlantic Exiles," funded by a Starting Grant of the European Research Council (ERC). Based on a number of case studies in the Caribbean and on the American continent, the project explores the history of revolutionary-era refugee movements. Jan is founding member and convener of the Annual International Seminar in Historical Refugee Studies "Historicizing the Refugee Experience (17th-21st Centuries)," organized with a number of partners across Europe and the United States. He is also Principal Investigator in the Research Unit "Ambiguity and Distinction," funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), where he leads a project on alien laws in the revolutionary-era Caribbean; and associated researcher of the interdisciplinary Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21).
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