Laura-Elena Keck

Laura-Elena Keck is the Interim Research Coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science from January 2025 to April 2026. In this role, she is responsible for supporting the development of the Institute's research events program with the aim of facilitating scholarly dialogue, designing and implementing career support for junior scholars in various formats as well as advancing the institute-wide international guest program in collaboration with all units of the MPIWG.

She studied history at Humboldt University in Berlin as well as in Augsburg and Istanbul and holds a PhD from the University of Leipzig. For her dissertation, entitled Fleischkonsum und Leistungskörper in Deutschland, 1850–1914 (Wallstein: Göttingen, 2023), she examined meat consumption around 1900 at the intersection of the histories of knowledge and the body, showing how the production of new, contested “meat knowledge(s)” contributed to the establishment of new concepts of productivity and physical efficiency.

Prior to joining the MPIWG, Laura was a postdoc at the University of Leipzig, where she worked on a transregional history of quarantine knowledge in the twentieth century, with a focus on the USA and South Africa, and was a member of the interdisciplinary LeipzigLab and the DFG-funded research project  Pandemic Space: Understanding Quarantine and Responsibilization in Times of Corona.