Dr. Lasse Heerten


Email: Lasse.Heerten@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Tel.: (+49) 0234 32 26717
Room: GA 6/55


(Picture: Christoph Kalter)

Lasse Heerten is a transnational and global historian of modern Europe and the world. He is PI of the project “Imperial Gateway: Hamburg, the German Empire, and the Making of a Global Port”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He worked on this project at the Freie Universität Berlin from 2015, and moved the Project to the Ruhr-University in 2019, when he accepted a post as a Lecturer with the Chair for Transnational History of the Nineteenth Century. He is currently writing his second book, the Habilitation and monograph based on this research, tentatively titled “Wasser und Stein. Der Hamburger Hafen im Zeitalter globaler Imperien” (“Water and Stone: The Port of Hamburg in the Age of Global Empires”). The study will contribute to the historiography of port cities in the steam age, of the German Empire in urban and global perspective, and, from a historical perspective, to the current interdisciplinary debate about the Anthropocene.

Lasse Heerten holds degrees from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (BA in History, English and American Studies, 2006), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (MA in Modern History, 2008), the University of Oxford (MSt in Historical Research, 2009), and the Freie Universität Berlin (Dr. Phil in Modern History, with the highest distinction, “summa cum laude”, 2014), and he did part of his graduate work at the Université Paris-Sorbonne and the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne. His graduate studies were supported by various institutions, notably a scholarship by the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes).

In his first book he analyses how the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), a Third World conflict that had initially been of marginal international interest, became a global media and protest event when the humanitarian crisis in Biafra aroused concern among publics around the globe. Based on research conducted in more than two dozen archives on three different continents, he revised his dissertation for publication as a book during a year of teaching and research at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Human Rights in 2014-2015. The book was published with Cambridge University Press in 2017, and as a paperback in 2019.

Publications (Selection)


Books and Theme Issues

Journal Articles and Book Chapters