Biography

Prof Dr Thomas Etzemüller is currently Professor of Cultural History of Modernity at the University of Oldenburg. He studied Modern and Contemporary History, Art History and Empirical Cultural Studies in Tübingen and Film Studies in Stockholm. He completed his doctorate in Tübingen in 2001 with a study on the sociology of science, which examined the institutionalisation of social history as a new field of research in historical science; his habilitation in Oldenburg in 2010 focused on the genuinely modern social technology of "social engineering" using the example of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal. Other research projects and publications have dealt with population discourse since 1798, German racial anthropology, which sought to transform worldview into science, biographical research and science studies, most recently with an anthology on "Performance in Science". Key figures in his research include Niklas Luhmann, Michel Foucault, Ludwik Fleck and image studies.

Selected publications

Etzemüller, Thomas: The Romanticism of Rationality. Alva & Gunnar Myrdal - Social Engineering in Sweden, Bielefeld 2010 (English translation 2014).

Etzemüller, Thomas: In Search of the Nordic Man. German racial anthropology in the modern world, Bielefeld 2015.

Etzemüller, Thomas (ed.): The Order of Modernity. Social Engineering in the 20th Century, Bielefeld 2009.

Etzemüller, Thomas: Brasilia as Experimental Space and Gesamtkunstwerk, in: Böschen, Stefan/Groß, Matthias/Krohn, Wolfgang (eds.): Experimentelle Gesellschaft. Das Experiment als wissensgesellschaftliches Dispositiv, Baden-Baden 2017, pp. 269-289.

Etzemüller, Thomas: Diagnosing the present means making something visible as something. Perception, visualisation and intervention in figures of modernity, in: Alkemeyer, Thomas/Buschmann, Nikolaus/Etzemüller, Thomas (eds.): Gegenwartsdiagnosen. Cultural Forms of Social Self-Problematisation in Modernity, Bielefeld 2019, pp. 105-126.

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