roman_birkeI am a postdoctoral researcher with the Department of History and the interdisciplinary research cluster Structural Change of Property at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. My main fields of research are international and transnational history of the 20th century. I specialize in the history of human rights and humanitarianism, population control and eugenics, colonialism and property relations, and gender history.

I received my PhD from the University of Vienna in 2018. My PhD-Thesis was awarded the Theodor-Körner-Prize 2017 and the Grete-Mostny-Prize 2019.

Before starting my position at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, I was a Fritz Thyssen Foundation Fellow of the Study Group Human Rights in the 20th Century from 2017 to 2018. From 2013 to 2017, I was a pre-doctoral Lecturer at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna.

I held visiting fellowships at Columbia University and Trinity College Dublin.

Career breaks: Between 2019 and 2022 I took a total of 18 months of paternity leave under the German government’s parental leave scheme.