Malin Sonja Wilckens M.A.
Member of the academic staff, Deputy Equal Opportunities Officer
Room: 03 / 306Phone: +49 6131 39 39378
Personal Details:
Malin Wilckens studied history and politics in Göttingen, Bielefeld and Colchester (UK) between 2012 and 2018. Between 2018-2023, she completed her doctoral studies at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology. During her doctoral studies, she was a doctoral scholarship holder of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, a research fellow at Stanford University and the GHI Washington and an associate member of the SFB 1288 "Practices of Comparing" at Bielefeld University. She has also worked as a research assistant at the Chairs of 19th and 20th Century History (Bielefeld) and 19th to 21st Century History (Kiel). She has been a research associate at the IEG since November 2023.
Image rights: Philipp Ottendörfer
Image rights: Philipp Ottendörfer
Research interests:
Global and global microhistory
Entangled (European) history
History of science and knowledge
Historical 'race" studies, in particular comparative anatomy/anthropology in Europe/North America in the 18th and 19th centuries
Environmental history
Selected Publications:
Jonatan Kurzwelly/Malin S. Wilckens, Calcified identities: Persisting essentialism in academic collections of human remains, in: Anthropological Theory 23 (2023) 1, S. 100–122, open access, https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996221133872.
Malin S. Wilckens/Jonatan Kurzwelly, Wert und Verwendung menschlicher Überreste – Vergangene und gegenwärtige Perspektiven im interdisziplinären Dialog, in: Special Issue der Historischen Anthropologie 30 (2022) 3, Totes Kapital, S. 329–349, open access, https://doi.org/10.7788/hian.2022.30.3.329.
Malin S. Wilckens, Differenz messen – Der Schädel als ,Objekt-Subjekt‘ zur Klassifikation von ‚Rassen‘ in der Vergleichenden Anatomie des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, in: Cornelia Aust/Antje Flüchter/Claudia Jarzebowski (eds.), Verglichene Körper – Normieren, Urteilen, Entrechten in der Vormoderne, Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart 2022, S. 179–203.
Julian T. D. Gärtner/Malin S. Wilckens (Hg.), Racializing Humankind. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Practices of ‘Race’ and Racism, Böhlau: Wien/Köln 2022.
Malin S. Wilckens, Racializing, Comparing and Theorizing Skulls – Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s and Anders Retzius’ Practices of Ordering Humankind, in: Julian T. D. Gärtner/Malin S. Wilckens (Hg.), Racializing Humankind: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Practices of ‘Race’ and Racism, Böhlau: Wien/Köln 2022, S. 91–110.
Research projects:
The match – a European economic, technological and environmental history
In the 1820s, a British pharmacist developed the first match, replacing highly flammable phosphorus and sulphur-containing matches. A Swedish chemist perfected the technology and invented a new match in the 1840s: the safety match. While sulphur and white phosphorus had previously played a prominent role in the production of matches, the safety matches used the much less dangerous red phosphorus and potassium chlorate.