During a public award ceremony held yesterday at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Malin Wilckens received the Johannes Zilkens Doctoral Prize 2025 of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. We warmly congratulate her!
She is being honored for her dissertation “Skull Comparisons and the Ordering of the World – Processes of Racialization in Science (1780–1880)”. Her dissertation will be published in the renowned series “Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft” at Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Since November 2023, Malin Wilckens has been a research associate at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG). In addition to historical racism research—especially comparative anatomy/anthropology in Europe/North America in the 18th and 19th centuries—her research interests include global and global microhistory, European entanglement history, the history of knowledge/science, and the history of technology and the environment.
Her dissertation was written within SFB 1288 “Practices of Comparing. Ordering and Changing the World”, based at Bielefeld University. SFB 1288 examines practices of comparison across various cultures and historical periods, from antiquity to the present. You can learn more about Wilckens’ dissertation topic in the SFB 1288 blog; see the link below.
In August 2024, Malin Wilckens also spoke on the radio program “SFB 1288 on Hertz 87.9” about her research on comparison practices and the topic “Skull Comparisons and the Ordering of the World”. You can listen to the interview on Hertz 87.9 via the link provided below.
She also presented her dissertation project in the Leibniz format “Book a Scientist”, where she was accompanied by SWR. You can listen to the recording via the link provided below.
Image rights: private | Photographer: Philipp Ottendörfer
