The research and teaching of our department focus on modern and contemporary history, with an emphasis on the long 19th century, adopting transnational, (post-)colonial, and global perspectives. Our key research areas include the history of the Anthropocene, family and childhood, gender and sexuality, as well as the history of port cities, empires, capitalism, migration, and exile. In doing so, we particularly examine phenomena that cannot be fully understood from a purely nation-state perspective. A central aspect of our work is the analysis of networks that shaped these phenomena in the 19th century. We assume that mobility and migration, economy and money, knowledge and mentalities, as well as actors and goods, were shaped during this period by a complex interplay of local, regional, national, imperial/colonial, and global conditions.

Our transnational perspective prioritizes circulation, exchange, and border-crossing as central modes of analysis, while also considering their apparent opposites, such as stagnation, inward perspectives, and the manifestation of boundaries. This dialectic between the ‚national container‘ and the other spatial modes of border-crossing mentioned above constitutes a key approach in our research and teaching.