Christine von Oertzen

My work considers gender relations in society and science. Entitled The Pleasure of a Surplus Income(2007), my first monograph explored gender politics and social change in West Germany. The focus of my second book, Science, Gender, and Internationalism: Women's Academic Networks, 1917–1955(2014), was the creation and maintenance of female academic networks in western Europe and North America from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. A project website provides an online biographical database of the many actors figuring in the book.

My recent publications have extended my interest in gender and science to the material culture of collecting, compiling, and visualizing data. I am currently researching manual and machine processing of nineteenth-century census data, as well as the at-home observation of infants. Technologies of Orderliness traces the emergence of data driven methods in nineteenth-century population statistics. Citizen Science of the Mind explores at-home observation, note-taking, and data compilation on the minds of infants in the context of fin-de-siècle efforts to unlock humanity’s evolutionary roots.

Since 2012, I have co-organized four working groups within Department II, resulting in the following co-edited publications: Beyond the Academy: Histories of Gender and Knowledge (with Maria Rentetzi and Elizabeth Watkins) and Data Histories (with Elena Aronova and David Sepkoski). Working With Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge (with Carla Bittel and Elaine Leong). The History of Bureaucratic Knowledge (with Sebastian Felten). (with Sebastian Felten) is currently in preparation and will be published in 2020.

I earned my PhD at the Free University of Berlin in 1998. Subsequently, I taught at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Women and Gender at the Technical University in Berlin. From 2002 to 2005, I was a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. In 2009, I joined the faculty of the History Department at the Technical University Braunschweig as a Privatdozentin. I am a member of the advisory boards of the journals WerkstattGeschichte (since 2001) and NTM (since 2018). I serve as the representative of the researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science to the Social Science and Humanities Section of the Max Planck Society (2012-2019).