The Cluster of Excellence "Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies".

The BCDSS is delighted to announce that as of October 2021, Julia Hillner, Claudia Jarzebowski, Pia Wiegmink and Christoph Witzenrath will hold our four BCDSS Professorships.

Julia Hillner, who will start her post in October 2021m is already at the BCDSS as a Heinz Heinen Fellow. She works predominantly on the transformations of the family and the household in the period 300–750 and how these are reflected in legal norms and practices. In addition, she also focuses on a number of related topics ranging from the urban context of the family and property holding, particularly in the late antique city of Rome, to issues of authority, hierarchy and discipline within the household and how these have influenced concepts and practices of state punishment in late antiquity.

Claudia Jarzebowski will start her BCDSS Professorship in September 2021. In her current research, she focuses on global and gender history of the early modern period, including the history of dependence and enslavement, as well as the genesis of bourgeois society. She has previously focused on the social and cultural history of the early modern period, the history of children and emotion during the period of 1450-1800, and on historical research into violence and crime.

Pia Wiegmink will start her BCDSS Professorship in September 2021. Pia Wiegmink is interested in cultural practices and narratives of nineteenth-century American slavery and dependency and their transatlantic entanglements and circulation. In previous research projects, she examined US American abolitionist literature in specific transnational contexts and highlighted the role of women as producers, subjects and audiences of abolitionist literature.

Christoph Witzenrath has been Professor at the BCDSS since 2017. His research focuses on the Eurasian steppe and its neighbors, and on the influence of nomadic-settled relations and the slave trade on social dependency and political representation. He aims to analyze Eurasian societies’ structural and cultural specificities that are characterized by a significant gap between state and dependent social groups.