Eleonora Rohland

Biography

Eleonora Rohland studied economic, social, and environmental history and English Linguistics at the University of Bern/ Switzerland. She concluded her MA studies in 2009 with a thesis on the history of the Swiss reinsurance company Swiss Re, working on the interface of economic, environmental, and climate history as well as historical disaster studies.

Since 2008 Eleonora Rohland is an Associate Junior Fellow at the Insitute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen (KWI). She is a PhD candidate in the project Memories of Diasters which is part of the research program Climate & Culture. Her PhD thesis focuses on the historical perception and adaptation to hurricane disasters in New Orleans (Hurricanes in New Orleans, 1722-2005. An Urban Biography of Disaster (working title)).

From December 2009 to January 2010 Eleonora was a visiting scholar at the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University (LSU) while conducting interviews on the memory of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

From May to August 2010 she held a PhD fellowship at the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington DC.

In November 2010 the working group for critical business history (AKKU) awarded the young researchers award for her MA thesis „The Swiss Re Fire Branch 1864-1906. Risk – Fire – Climate“

In March 2011 Eleonora was a Fellow of the 8th Spring Academy at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA)

From January to February 2012 she held a short-term fellowship at the German Historical Institute in Paris (DHIP)

Research Focus

perceptions and cultural representations of disasters in the past (historical disaster studies), the reconstruction of past climates with the help of written sources (historical climatology), environmental history, history of science and technology, French colonial history of Louisiana, economic and business history with a particular focus on insurance history

Publications

Book:

Sharing the risk. Fire, climate and disaster, Swiss Re, 1864-1906, Lancaster: Crucible Books 2011.

Journal Articles:

From Wood to Stone. The Risk Management of Swiss Re in the Sundsvall Fire 1888, in: Environment and History 17.1 (2011), 153-169. (reprint in EABH Bulletin 1 (2011), 10-16.)

Fire in Swiss Re's Early History, 1864-1906: Perspectives for an Environmental Business History?, in: EABH Bulletin 1 (2010), 40-46.

Book Chapters:

Hurricanes on the Gulf Coast: Environmental Knowledge and Science in French Louisiana, 1722 and beyond, in: Rood, Dan, Manning, Patrick (eds.), Linnaean Worlds: Global Scientific Practice, 1750-1850, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press (forthcoming).

Co-authored with with Maike Böcker, Gitte Cullmann, Ingo Haltermann and Franz Mauelshagen: Why People Don't Leave. Attachment to Place in the Aftermath of Disasters. Perspectives from Four Continents, in: Cave, Mark and Stephen Sloan (eds.), Oral History and Crisis, New York: Oxford University Press (in preparation).

Earthquake versus Fire: The Struggle over Insurance in the Aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco Disaster, in: Janku, Andrea, Schenk, Gerrit and Mauelshagen, Franz (eds.), Communicating Historical Disaster Experiences. Politics, Science and Religion, London: Routledge 2012, 174-194.

Reviews and Conference Reports:

Review of Ortwin Pelc (ed.), Katastrophen in Norddeutschland. Vorbeugung, Bewältigung und Nachwirkungen vom Mittelalter bis ins 21. Jahrhundert (Studien zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Schleswig-Holsteins 45). Wachholtz, Neumünster 2010, in: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 98.2 (2011), 220.

Conference Report: The Politics of Disasters - Fourth conference of the network “Historical Study of Disasters in Cultural Comparative Perspective”. 21.09.2007-22.09.2007, Bern. In: H-Soz-u-Kult, 23.11.2007, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=1779.

Activities

Member of the American Historical Association (AHA)
Member of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH)

Member of the Climate History Network: http://climatehistorynetwork.com/; https://www.facebook.com/climatehistorynetwork