Martin Bauer
Fellow, March–September 2025
martin.t.bauer[at]t-online.de

After studying philosophy, comparative literature, and religious studies, I spent most of my professional life as a nonfiction editor in different publishing houses. Most recently, I was the editor of Mittelweg 36, the bimonthly magazine of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, and Soziopolis, a website covering social sciences.

On Prophecy: Perceiving the Present

Different Eastern and Western cultures have developed different modes of prophecy, as powerful means to forecast future events. At the same time, these prophetic, often apocalyptic speech acts are political interventions. The impressive variety of prophetic discourses offers a useful paradigm for the practice of social criticism. Following this genealogical observation, Michel Foucault remarked in the mid-1960s that post-Nietzschean philosophy is commited to the diagnostic ambition of “predicting the present.” My project will uncover possible readings of Foucault’s point: What are the historical, sociological, and epistemological implications of prophecy as a literary genre devoted to coming to terms with a present era?

Prof. Dr. Laetitia Lenel
Fellow, April–August 2025
laetitia.lenel[at]uni-due.de

I am Professor of Economic History at the University of Duisburg-Essen. My research brings together the study of economic knowledge practices and economic history. Among other topics, I investigate the history of business forecasting and how societies have grappled with economic turbulence.

Crisis as a Practice of Periodization in History, Economics, and Politics

This project traces the circulation of “crisis” as a practice of periodization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Crisis is usually portrayed as the endpoint of a past detrimental development, a critical juncture that will determine the future. I study the nineteenth-century migration of this periodization practice from the philosophy and theory of history to economics, and ask how early twentieth-century economic research popularized it, propelling it into political discourse. Through two in-depth studies located in 1970s and 2010s Germany and the United States, I examine how politicians used the practice to legitimize their own interventions and delegitimize those of others, and explore the extent to which it not only described crises, but also reinforced them performatively.

Dr. Ina Heumann
Fellow, April–July 2025
ina.heumann[at]mfn.berlin

I am a historian of science and co-lead the Center for the Humanities of Nature at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. I study the politics of natural history and am particularly interested in issues of natural history and empire, economies of collections, and the social and political responsibilities of natural history museums.

Theaters of War: Natural History Provenances and Institutional Responsibility

European and non-European wars are reflected in natural history collections in many ways. Parts of the collections originate from theaters of war and can be traced back to military actors, as is eloquently testified by insects from the First World War trenches, mammals from colonial “punitive expeditions,” and birds shot by members of the Waffen-SS at Auschwitz, as well as collections destroyed by war. These raise the question of how violent provenances continue to shape museum practices of collecting, preserving, researching, and presenting nature today. My project studies theaters of war in natural history, locating natural history institutions as central sites of military violence, geopolitical interests, and institutional responsibility.

Prof. Dr. Christine von Oertzen
October 2024–March 2025
oertzenc[at]hu-berlin.de

I am a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin and a professor in the Media Studies Department at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. At the MPIWG, I am a member of Department Benson, where I lead the research group “Data, Media, Mind.” At the HU, my teaching focuses on media practices.

Description, Review, Narration: Positioning At-Home Observation of Infants in Fin-de-Siècle Scientific Discourse

My project takes Milicent Shinn, a reknowned figure in the emerging field of at-home study of the early development of infants, as a case in point to explore how training in the humanities, and in particular literary training, was made fruitful in the human sciences. One of the first women to receive a degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1878, Shinn started observing her baby niece at home in the early 1890s. I examine Shinn’s method of narrating her niece’s development as an example of participant observation avant la lettre, in which literary forms of close description and critical review figured prominently.