I studied history and philosophy in Leiden and Berlin, specializing in the philosophy and methodology of the humanities and in intellectual history. My two MA-theses on Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and on Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation raised my interest in the history of language and its role in historical processes.
This led me to Bielefeld, where from 2006 to 2010 I held a scholarship in the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology. My PhD-project, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Willibald Steinmetz, was concerned with the emergence of modern discourses of decadence (Kulturkritik) in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Using the methods of historical semantics, I shed new light on this topic, shifting the focus from the canonical ‘family’ of critics to the family resemblances of their language. On December 15, 2010, I graduated as a PhD (summa cum laude).
Since April 2011, I hold the position of “assistant” at the chair of Modern Western European History (Prof. Dr. Jörn Leonhard) at Freiburg University. Besides teaching and organizational tasks, I am currently developing a research project on the role of silence in political communication in 19th century Europe.
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