Research

Transnational History of Genetic Screening

I am currently working on a book on the transnational history of genetic screening in the Republic of Ireland, West Germany, the GDR, and the United States. The book examines how advocacy groups and parents across the Iron Curtain and in different religious and political environments advocated for the right to access genetic screening services. For example, in Western European and US courts, parents frequently employed discourses of “wrongful births” and “wrongful life” to argue for their perceived right to genetic knowledge and abortions. In the GDR, East German citizens demanded the expansion of reproductive rights in letter campaigns directed at state officials. The book also explores how these domestic campaigns intersected with the emerging human rights discourse on genetics within the United Nations. My argument is that while domestic advocacy—often fuelled by feminist movements—promoted genetic screening as part of individual reproductive rights that diverged from UN resolutions. The UN’s focus was on anti-discrimination, anti-racism, and the recognition of genetic diversity as a vital part of humanity’s joint heritage, sometimes contradicting individual rights claims. Overall, the book examines the complex and uneasy relationship between the expansion of reproductive rights, discourses on genetic fitness/eugenics, and the role of international law.

Population Control and Human Rights

My first book, Population Control as a Human Right (published in German in 2020, english translation forthcoming with Cambridge University Press), investigates policies around overpopulation discourse in the 20th century and argues that advocates of fertility control in the US/UK and the Global South employed human rights arguments to justify authoritarian policies in Asian, Latin-American, and African countries. It shows that, in the 1950s and 1960s, claims of an endangerment of human rights by population growth proved to be a key factor for the success of population control programs in the Global South, which was a surprising result given the coercive nature of such programs. While references to human rights became successful in securing international funding for global fertility control programs, such arguments became contested by a wide range of actors. To understand the impact of these ambiguous rights claims for domestic policies, the book employs four case studies. It uses India, Ireland, the USA, and Yugoslavia as examples to explore multi-directional transfers between international institutions and countries across the Iron Curtain and the North/South divide. Based on the intersection between the medical humanities and global history, the book made a significant contribution to gendered notions of fertility control and human rights during decolonization and the Cold War.

Digital Humanities

I have a background in IT and believe that combining traditional historical methods with digital tools can significantly enhance historical research. Believing in the importance of equipping students with an understanding of digital tools, especially in light of the growing impact of AI, I teach introductory courses on programming and text-mining for humanities students. Several parts of my research utilize digital methods, including a book chapter on Eleanor Roosevelt’s My Day column, of which she wrote approximately 8,000 between 1936 and 1962. In my contribution, I used text-mining tools to analyze these columns, focusing on how her views on key human rights issues evolved before and after her tenure as Chair of the UN Human Rights Commission.

Colonialism

I am finishing a project that I started at the University of Jena which investigates the history of colonial property policies within the German Empire. This project was based within the framework of the interdisciplinary research cluster “Structural Change of Property” which is a vibrant community of 92 researchers conducting interdisciplinary work on the past and present of property relations. I use archival documents which originated in today’s Cameroon, Tanzania, Western Samoa, and the Chinese Shandong Peninsula to investigate property-based conflicts between German trading companies/settler societies and the colonial administrators. Acknowledging key works on expropriation and colonial violence, including genocide, I argue that expropriations of landed property were only one part of wider policies, which could also include the preservation of indigenous property titles by German colonial administrators or compensations for expropriations.

History of Gender and Sexuality

I have an ongoing research focus on global gender and sexuality history. My research on the human rights aspects of fertility control policies enabled me to develop a deep understanding of gender and family norms for human rights history. Building on that knowledge, in 2018, I co-edited the volume Menschenrechte und Geschlecht (Human Rights and Gender) on the significance of gender for human rights in the 20th century (Wallstein Verlag, co-edited with Carola Sachse). Within the field of historical sexuality studies, I publish on the prosecution of homosexuality in National Socialism and after 1945, focusing on medical crimes like forced and “voluntary” castrations.