Dr Margret Frenz

 

Welcome! 

I am a global, transnational, and imperial historian, with a strong emphasis on comparative social and cultural perspectives. My interests are in how individuals experienced different social positions in colonial and post-colonial settings; how they remember their lives during and especially at the end of colonialism; and how these experiences can be related to the broader, structural history of empires, and of relationships between empires, and across nation-states.


In my current post at the Ministry of Science, Research, and Arts Baden-Württemberg, my main responsibility is to coordinate the restitution of cultural artefacts and repatriation of human remains taken to Europe during the colonial period. Previously, I held a Heisenberg Position at the Institute of History at the University of Stuttgart, as well as posts at the Universities of Oxford (Oxford Centre for Global History and St Cross College), Leicester, Berlin, Bayreuth, and Heidelberg. In 2010/11, I was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and in 2015/16, I worked as a Fellow at the Institut d'Études Avancées de Nantes. 

 

Research Interests

History of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries
• Connected histories: India, Africa, and Europe in a global context
• Comparative colonial and imperial history
• Social and cultural history
• History of migration and memory
• Debates in historiography and methodology