PD Dr. Sonja Levsen (en)

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	Dilthey Fellow   Lehrstuhl für Neuere und Neueste Geschichte Westeuropas Historisches Seminar Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg Belfortstr. 20, Rückgeb., R. 205 Tel. +49 / (0)761 / 203 97870 Sekretariat: +49 / (0)761 / 203 3421 E-Mail: sonja.levsen@geschichte.uni-freiburg.de
CV Publications Current Research Projects Awards, Prizes and Fellowships Research Projects and External funding Conference Organisation Membership Teaching

I am a historian of Modern Europe, with an emphasis on Germany, France and Britain, and particularly interested in the combination of comparative and transnational approaches. My last book, 'Autorität und Demokratie. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Erziehungswandels in Westdeutschland und Frankreich' analyses how shifting ways of conceptualizing democracy came to transform educational and parental practices in both countries. My research is guided by a strong interest in reframing German contemporary history from a European perspective and in understanding the respective relevance of national and transnational spaces in recent history. Thematically, I currently focus on the history of European democracies since 1945, exploring intersections of knowledge and democracy, and on the history of sexual violence, with a focus on children, knowledge production, and political responses to sexual violence.

CV

PhD (2004,) University of Tübingen, Habilitation (2017), University of Freiburg. Interim professorships at the Universities of Munich (2018/19; 2020/21) and Freiburg (2016/17), Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (2011), Dilthey Fellowship of the VolkswagenStiftung (2011-today). The Dilthey Fellowship is annually awarded to ten researchers in the humanities at German Universities.

My research has received funding from large funding bodies including the German Research Foundation, the VolkswagenFoundation, the Max-Weber-Foundation, and several awards. I was a member of the Tübingen Research Center Experiences of War (2001-2007) and an Assistant Professor at the University of Freiburg (2007-2010). I was on maternity leave for several months in 2013/14, 2008/09 and 2007.

Selected Publications

In November 2019 my last book Autorität und Demokratie. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Erziehungswandels (Wallstein, 2019, 711p.) came out. Recent journal articles include “Authority and Democracy in Postwar France and Germany”, in Journal of Modern History (2017), “Sexualität und Politik um 1968. Eine transnationale Geschichte?”, in Journal of Modern European History (2019), as well as a special issue of Geschichte and Gesellschaft, focussing on Western Europe in the 1970s (2016). The edited collection Wo liegt die Bundesrepublik? Vergleichende Perspektiven auf die westdeutsche Geschichte (Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 2016, ed. with Cornelius Torp) brought together chapters reinterpreting recent German History from comparative perspectives. War Volunteering in Modern Times (Palgrave Macmillan 2011, ed. with Christine Krüger) offers global perspectives on war and society since the French Revolution. My first book was Elite, Männlichkeit und Krieg. Tübinger und Cambridger Studenten, 1900-1929 (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2006); some of its results were published in Past & Present (2008) as “Constructing Elite Identities: University Students, Military Masculinity and the Consequences of the Great War in Britain and Germany”.

For a full list of publications see the German version of the website.

Current Research Projects

Why Europe, which Europe? A Debate on the Present and Future of European History as a Field of Research (2020-2022). With Joerg Requate (Kassel), and in Cooperation with the Max-Weber-Stiftung and the German Historical Institutes.

Between national spaces of historical enquiry on the one and global history on the other side: what are European history’s contributions to understanding the past – and the present? What, if any, are its methodological and heuristic characteristics? In which ways has the field developed within the last decade in research institutions all over Europe – and where do we want it to head within the near future? These questions, surprisingly, have never been discussed in a truly European perspective, between historians from all parts of Europe. EuropeDebate aims to kick off such a debate. https://europedebate.hypotheses.org/; https://twitter.com/DebateEuropean.

Beyond ‘Transnationalism`. Mapping the Spatial Contours of Political Activism in Europe’s Long 1970s with Kiran Patel, Munich. Funded by the VolkswagenStiftung and the University of Maastricht, 2018-2020.

Historians have been conceptualizing the period from the late 1960s onwards as a time of accelerating transnationalisation. For Europe, as the focus of this international project, a recurrent variant of the argument interprets the multiplication and intensification of transfers and entanglements since the 1960s as furthering processes of denationalisation and convergence. Very often, research of this kind focuses less on the precise nature and scope of “transnationalism”, but rather on the sheer fact that processes and networks transcended the boundaries of nations. Instead of normative overdrive or a rather positivistic approach to “transnationalism”, our project seeks to map the specific spatial contours of transnational actions, as well as the factors driving and limiting them. The results of two international workshops will be published as a special issue.

Awards, Prizes and Fellowships

Research Projects and External funding

Conference Organisation

Membership

• Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Stiftung-Bundespräsident-Theodor-Heuss-Haus
• Elected Committee Member of the German Historical Association
• German Association for British Studies
• Comité Franco-Allemand des Historiens/Deutsch-französisches Historikerkomitee
• Arbeitskreis Historische Friedens- und Konfliktforschung
• Frankreich-Zentrum der Universität Freiburg

Teaching Experience