Academic interests
History of knowledge in the humanities, 19th and 20th centuries, especially historiography and philology, orientalism, and textual scholarship; theory and philosophy of history; cultural history of moralities and moral thought in the late modern period, in particular with a view to humanitarianism and lifesaving movements; maritime history, in particular regarding shipwreck, accidents and disasters, and their visual history.
Background
PhD in History and Civilization EUI Florence, 2008, Habilitation (modern history) University of Zurich, 2018. Postdoctoral researcher, University of Zurich 2009-11; M4Human Marie Curie Fellowship (Gerda Henkel Foundation) at EHESS, Paris, 2012-15; Member, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2013-14; lecturer and adjunct lecture Technische Universität Berlin, 2014-16; Core Member, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2016-19; senior researcher, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), Berlin, 2019-2025 (deputy director, 2023-24). PI ERC Consolidator Grant Project "Archipelagic Imperatives: Shipwreck and Lifesaving in European Societies since 1800," 2020-2025. Associate professor IFIKK, from 2025.
Selected Publications
- Topography of a Method: François Louis Ganshof and the Writing of History (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014).
- ed. with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
- Orientalism, Philology, and the Illegibility of the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
- Seuchenjahr (Berlin: August, 2021).
- ed. with Wolfgang Hottner, Japonismen der Theorie (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2021).
- Unsterbliche Werte: Über Historizität und Historisierung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2024).
- ed. with Jonathan Stafford, Burkhardt Wolf, Moral Seascapes: On the Ethics and Aesthetics of Maritime Emergency (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2024).