Research

Research interests

Early modern consumers, non-European drugs and global markets.

My current research focuses on the emergence of consumer society in the context of European expansion since the early modern period. My research interest in this field includes the history of trade in global goods, the production of knowledge about non-European drugs and the development of an early (mass) consumer society since the 18th century in Central Europe. I have published on these topics in  the Economic History Review and write a book on trade and knowledge production about non-European medicine in the German Hinterland.

Social networks, family and labour markets in premodern rural society.

In my PhD, I analysed families and social networks in a Northwestern German rural society in 18th and 19th centuries. My focus here was on the history of social inequality in a society on its way to modernity. Using methods such as social network analysis, I analysed kinship and godparent relationships and asked about modes of social reproduction. In addition to a book publication, I have amoung others published about this research in leading journals such as Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, and the The History of the Family. 

In this field, my research interests include the history of rural society, property, land ownership and credit markets. I have published on labour markets, landless rural households, credit markets and co-edited a book on Landless Households in Rural Europe (1600-1900).

Digital History I: Digital Analysis of Early Modern Publications

Of central importance for the establishment of knowledge about pre-modern medicine are those media that served as filters for the emerging body of knowledge. Lexicons, encyclopaedias, medical and pharmaceutical handbooks, materia medica, pharmacopoeias and merchants' manuals are used to trace this process in different, but not necessarily separate, discourses. These media are analysed using digital techniques. Newer methods of digital data analysis complement classical methods of text analysis and - in a very similar way to network analysis with reference to social structures - enable the discovery of text-inherent structures and levels of meaning that allow conclusions to be drawn about the structuring of the new bodies of knowledge. The project therefore takes place in the context of the digitalisation of source material and allows the testing of new methodological approaches, some of which have already been introduced in neighbouring disciplines.

Digital History II: Historical social network analysis and premodern society

In this study, methods of digital history are used for in-depth analyses. The development of suitable methods of data acquisition, data collection and the linking of information from disparate sources formed the basis for detailed and methodologically sophisticated analyses. In addition to the application of common statistical methods, I conducted formal network analyses, drawing on various approaches within social network research. The visualisation of the results obtained is also one of the methods used, which are particularly suitable for the presentation of network analyses. It could thus be shown that the formal analysis of social networks, which has hardly been tested on historical material, can also be used successfully to analyse historical societies. This study and the related works show how quantitative methods can be successfully used in historical studies and can be considered methodologically innovative in historical studies.