I am a cultural historian and theorist, with a focus on science & technology studies, critical urban history, and spatial theory. In my research, I explore the empirical as well as conceptual relations of urbanization, technology and everyday life in the 20th and 21st century. Often mobilizing a transatlantic perspective, my work has contributed insights into new materialities and infrastructures in social and cultural history and theory.
I have been trained mostly in interdisciplinary academic environments in Europe and the US and received my PhD in 2008 for a dissertation on the history of New York’s subway passenger culture. Before becoming a permanent research fellow at KWI in 2022, I have held positions as a lecturer and researcher at Humboldt University and Technical University Berlin, a lecturer at New York University, a Mercator fellow at KWI and a visiting scholar at Columbia University New York and the Freetown of Christiania.
For nearly a decade, I am developing empirical and conceptual work on the role of cooling and climate control in modern cultures and how these technologies have drastically restructured life both on a biological and social level. Since September 2024, I am Principal Investigator in the ERC Synergy Grant Project Cultures of the Cryosphere. Infrastructures, Politics and Futures of Artificial Cooling. My research also focuses on the social and cultural histories of pharmaceuticals and narcotics. From 2019 to 2022, I led the international projectGoverning the Narcotic City. Imaginaries, Practices and Discourses of Public Drug Cultures in European Cities from 1970 until today. (HERA JRP/Horizon 2020).
Since 2015, I am also part of the editorial collective of sub\urban – Zeitschrift für kritische Stadtforschung, a pioneering open access journal of German urban studies. I have also worked to develop historical databases, such as the Narcotic City Archive – the first open access archive preserving the narcotic heritage of European cities and beyond.
Research Interests
Modern and Contemporary History, Science & Technology Studies, Critical Urban History, Social and Cultural Theory of the 20th and 21st Century, Digital Publication formats
Selected English Publications
Narcotic Cities: Counter-Cartographies of Drugs and Spaces (co-edited with Mélina Germes und Luise Klaus), Berlin: Jovis/De Gruyter,2023.
Cities of Cool Comfort: Cryogenic Urbanization in the 20th Century in the Rise of Wellbeing Regimes, in: Joseph Heathcott, Jonathan Soffer, Rae Zimmerman (Hrsg.): Urban Infrastructure – Historical and Social Dimensions of an Interconnected World, Pittsburgh University Press, 2022.
Riding the New York Subway – The Invention of the Modern Passenger, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2021.
Beyond American Dystopia: On the Rise of Apocalyptic Visions in the Contemporary United States, in: Amerikastudien /American Studies, Bd. 66, S. 271-77, 2021.
Regimes of Freshness – Biopolitics in the Age of Cryogenic Culture [with Alexander Friedrich]. In: Medicine, Anthropology and Theory, 3, no. 3:112-154, 2017.
Marian Burchardt, Stefan Höhne and AbdouMaliq Simone (eds.): The Infrastructures of Diversity: Materiality and Culture in Urban Space. New Diversities 17(2), 2015.