Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor
The Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship is a co-operation between the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the German Historical Institute London (GHIL), and the Gerda Henkel Professor’s home university. Its purpose is to promote awareness in Britain of German research on the history of the German Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic, and to stimulate comparative work on German history in a European context. The first professorship was awarded in 2009.
Anja Laukötter is a historian of modern Germany with an interest in the history of colonialism and its repercussions, the history of science and knowledge, the history of materiality and collections, the history of violence and the body, the history of emotions, of media, of doing truth, and the history of imaginations in the production of difference and democracy.
I have been a full professor of cultural history at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena since 2021. Previously I was a senior researcher in the “History of Emotions” department of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (2010-2021) and at the Institute for the History of Medicine, Berlin (2006-2010).
I received my PhD in 2006 and completed my habilitation in 2018 at the Humboldt University in Berlin. I studied modern and contemporary history, political science, and cultural anthropology at the University of Cologne, the New School for Social Research in New York City, and the Humboldt University Berlin.
In my publications I have explored nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history, with a focus on linkages between socio-political and cultural history and the history of science/knowledge. Within that framework I have concentrated on the history of colonialism and anthropology alongside museums and collections in my PhD, as well as the history of the body and emotions, psychology, medicine, and media such as photography, film, and television (in my habilitation). More recently, I have also become interested in the history of truth and the history of imaginations in othering processes and democratic societies.
For my second book (habilitation) I was awarded the Otto Hintze Prize of the Claudia and Michael Borgolte Foundation in 2019. Together with Christian Bonah (University of Strasbourg) I directed the international research group "The Healthy Self as Body Capital: Individuals, Market-Based Societies and Body Politics in Visual Twentieth Century Europe", funded by the European Research Council (Advanced Grant, 2016-2021). I am currently a Principle Investigator in the Cluster of Excellence “Imaginamics: Practices and Dynamics of Social Imagining” (2026-2032).
Research Project
Botany between Science and Politics from Pre-Colonial Times to the GDR: Local, Global, and (Post-)Colonial Entanglements
Systematic plant collecting in Europe began in the early modern period. Paula Findlen has described this as an attempt at “possessing nature”, tied to the emergence of natural history, museums, and botanical gardens. Collecting, classifying, and exhibiting plants was framed as key to understanding human history. By the eighteenth century, botany had consolidated into a discipline, shaped by Carl Linnaeus’ Species plantarum and its modern nomenclature. Today, botanical collections remain crucial for research in molecular biology, ecology, and climate science, marking a shift from “possessing” to “decoding” nature.
Against this background, the project situates the history of botany and botanical gardens in the GDR within European and global trajectories and in a longue durée. It starts with a focus on the botanist Carl Haussknecht, who collected plants in the Ottoman Empire and Persia during the nineteenth Century and established a herbarium in 1896 that became one of Europe’s largest. Transferred to Jena after 1945, it remained a core research resource, though travel restrictions narrowed its geographical scope. Collaboration with Cuba opened access to tropical flora, embedding botanical research in Cold War diplomacy. Symbolic meanings attached to plants further underscored their political function.
The project examines how colonial and neocolonial expeditions were structured and how they reshaped disciplinary perspectives and public exhibitions. It investigates the role of botanical gardens as sites of scientific practice and geopolitical competition. By linking local with global, colonial with postcolonial, and material with political history, the study analyses botany as a field deeply entangled with questions of science, power, and cultural representation.
Selected Publications
Monographs:
I have published two monographs:
- Sex – richtig! Körperpolitik und Gefühlserziehung im Kino des 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2021).
- Von der “Kultur” zur “Rasse” – vom Objekt zum Körper? Völkerkundemuseen und ihre Wissenschaften zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Bielefeld, 2007).
Edited volumes and special issues:
Besides a wide range of articles, I have edited several volumes and special issues (the following is only a selection):
- With Kim Siebenhüner (ed.), Räume und Zeiten des Kolonialen: Europäische Praktiken der Dominanz von der Frühen Neuzeit bis in die Gegenwart (forthcoming)
- With Benno Gammerl, Bettina Hitzer, and Margrit Pernau (ed.), Emotions meet History:Neue Perspektiven in der Gefühlsgeschichte, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften (forthcoming)
- With Ute Frevert, Margrit Pernau, Uffa Jensen, et al. (ed.), Wie Kinder fühlen lernten, 1870-1970 (Weinheim, 2021).
- With Christian Bonah (ed.), Body, Capital, and Screens: Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century (Amsterdam, 2020).
- With Christian Bonah and David Cantor (ed.), Health Education Films in the Twentieth Century (Rochester, NY, 2018).
- With Bettina Hitzer, Otniel Dror, and Pilar Leon-Sanz (ed.): History of Science and the Emotions, in: Osiris, 31 (2016).
- With Ute Frevert, Margrit Pernau, Uffa Jensen, et al. (e.a./ed.) Learning How to Feel. Children’s Literature and the History of Emotional Socialization, 1870-1970 (Oxford, 2014; also translated into Chinese: Taipei, Owl Publishing House, 2018).
Contact
Gerda Henkel Foundation:
Dr Sybille Springer
Tel.: +49 0211 936524 0
E-Mail: springer@gerda-henkel-stiftung.de
http://www.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de
German Historical Institute London:
Dr Michael Schaich
Tel.: +44 020 7309 2014
E-Mail: m.schaich@ghil.ac.uk
Previous Gerda Henkel Visiting Professors
| 2023/2024 | Prof Dr Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Berlin): Zeitgeschichte from the Margins: The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims |
| 2022/2023 | Prof Dr Constantin Goschler (Bochum): Cultures of Compromise in Germany and Britain 1945–2000 |
| 2021/2022 | Prof Dr Alexander Nützenadel (Berlin): Economic Populism and the Rise of Fascism in Interwar Europe |
| 2020/2021 | Prof Dr Martina Kessel (Bielefeld): The imagined individual: Narratives of self, history, and politics in modern Germany |
2019/2020 | Prof Dr Ulrich Herbert (Freiburg): Migration Policy in Germany and Europe, 1980–2019 |
| 2018/2019 | Prof Dr Johanna Gehmacher (Vienna): Records and Notes from Trans/National Networks: Politics and Women’s Movements around 1900 in the Personal Papers of Käthe Schirmacher (1865–1930) |
| 2017/2018 | Prof Dr Arnd Bauerkämper (Berlin): Security and Humanity in the First World War: The Treatment of Civilian 'Enemy Aliens' in the Belligerent States |
| 2016/2017 | Prof Dr Dominik Geppert (Bonn): A History of Divided Germany, 1945–1990 |
| 2015/2016 | Prof Dr Lutz Raphael (Trier): Transformations of Industrial Labour in Western Europe between 1970 and 2000 |
| 2014/2015 | Prof Dr Kiran Klaus Patel (Maastricht): Welfare in the Warfare State: Nazi Social Policy on the International Stage |
| 2013/2014 | Prof Dr Dorothee Wierling (Hamburg): Coffee Worlds. Trade in Green Coffee and its Agents: The Hamburg Coffee Merchants in the 20th century |
| 2012/2013 | Prof Dr Andreas Rödder (Mainz): The History of the Present |
| 2011/2012 | Prof Dr Ute Daniel (Braunschweig): Media and Politics: An entangled History (c. 1900–1980) |
| 2010/2011 | Prof Dr Christoph Cornelißen (Frankfurt am Main): The British and German Welfare States After 'the Great Boom': Public Debates on Social Inequality and Social Justice since the 1970s |
| 2009/2010 | Prof Dr Johannes Paulmann (Mainz): International Aid and Solidarity: Humanitarian Commitment and the Media in Germany, c. 1950–1985 |