Benno

"I learnt a lot at Goldsmiths. Not only did I begin to understand how and why one should and could write politically engaged and culturally open histories, I also found out how British academics go about the things they are dealing with and why is so fascinating and multifacetted.

Goldsmiths equipped me with the skills I needed to write a book on British history. Goldsmiths shifted my cultural and theoretical horizons. And Goldsmiths is the place where I met some of my dearest friends.  

I'm now a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions. I'm currently working on a project about homosexuality and emotional life in rural West Germany (1960-1990). Based on magazines as well as on oral history interviews I want to show how the emancipation of gay men and lesbians or the gradual normalisation of homosexualities since the 1970s impacted the ways in which women desiring women as well as men desiring men voiced, dealt with and experienced feelings like anger, love, grief and fear.

My previous book compared the legal and administrative handling of ethnically heterogeneous populations in the British and the Habsburg empires between 1867 and 1918. For this work I was recently awarded the Wolfgang J. Mommsen Prize. It will soon be translated into English."