"Contested Spaces, Geo-Interventions, and the Search for Order" The Annual Gerda Henkel Foundation Visiting Professorship Lecture

The predicaments of the early twenty-first century seem to call established narratives of modern trajectories into question. Environmental crisis and the shock of the Anthropocene coincide with disillusionment about classical tales of Western liberty, emancipation, and conquest of planetary space. How did we get there, and what kinds of stories should we be telling?

Paul Nolte’s (FU Berlin) lecture surveys the field for the case of modern Germany and suggests a framework that brings together recent approaches in the history of ecology, space and territory, and political regimes since the eighteenth century.

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.

About our Speaker:

Paul Nolte has been a full professor of modern and contemporary history at the Freie Universität Berlin since 2005. He earned his Ph.D. in 1993 at the University of Bielefeld, has been an assistant professor there and professor of history at International University Bremen, 2001-2005. In the academic year 2010-11, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Paul Nolte has worked extensively on the history of 19th and 20th century Germany, with a focus on the linkages between social, political, and intellectual history, as in the beginnings of party formation and radical ideology in the early 19th century, or notions of social order and class structure in the 20th century. Other interests include the history of democracy, biographical approaches to post-45 historiography, and, more recently, the history of space, territory, and landscape. At FU Berlin, he has been directing the M.A. program in Public History since its beginnings in 2008.

Since 2021, he has been participating in a major research cluster on contemporary arts, “Intervening Arts”, financed by the DFG. Paul Nolte has been chief and managing editor of a major peer-reviewed journal, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, from 2004 to 2024.

About our Chair:

Christina von Hodenberg is the Director of the German Historical Institute London (GHIL) and a Professor in European History at Queen Mary University of London. She has written five monographs in the fields of media history, social protest, and gender history. Her latest book The Other 1968: Social History of a West German Revolt, a revisionist account of the late 1960s protest movements, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024.