/ Organizational Unit
Institute for European Global Studies with new Directorate
The historian Prof. Dr. Madeleine Herren-Oesch resumes the management of the Institute for European Global Studies on 1 April 2013. At the same time, the institution widens its scientific focus: In addition to examining the European integration, the institute will develop research on Europe in a global perspective.
The new director of the Institute for European Global Studies, Madeleine Herren-Oesch, is an internationally renowned historian focusing on Europe. She was born in 1956 in Bern, where she studied history and received her doctorate in 1989 with a thesis on “International Social Policy before World War I from the Perspective of the French Third Republic”. Her habilitation thesis on “Backdoors to Power. Internationalism and Modernisation-Oriented Foreign Policy in Belgium, Switzerland, and the USA, 1865-1914” followed in 1997. Between 1996 and 2000, she was the head of the research project „Internationalisation Strategies as an Instrument of Swiss Foreign Policy” of the national research programme NFP 42 by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In addition to that, she was assistant professor at Zurich University between 1998 and 2004. Her most recent position was at Heidelberg University, where she held a chair of Modern History and was co-founder and co-director of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”.
The research interests of Madeleine Herren-Oesch include the historical and interdisciplinary research on Europe and its extension to Global History. She examined, for example, networks in European foreign policy, the development of transboundary networks and international societies as well as migration processes. With her publications on the processes of culture and knowledge transfer and about the history of international relations and organisations, she contributed to the establishment of theories and methods of transculturality in cultural studies.
Simultaneous to this change in personnel, the institution widens its scientific focus. In addition to examining European integration, the Institute for European Global Studies will now develop research on Europe in a global perspective. Through transdisciplinary methods and an increased interdisciplinary cooperation, the institution will focus on Europe’s interconnectedness, in particular with Asia and Africa.