Birgit Kolboske

In addition to the history of culture and science, Birgit Kolboske’s research spans political science, linguistics, semiotics, as well as Latin American studies. A certified translator herself, her academic interest in this field focuses on the role of interpreters in the war crimes trials in Germany, from the Nuremberg to the Auschwitz trials.

Following her MA at the Freie Universität Berlin in 1995 with a feminist analysis on the role of women in Latin American guerrilla movements, Birgit Kolboske worked for many years as a journalist, translator, and editor in Mexico, Guatemala and New York. In 2022, she received her PhD from the University of Leipzig with a dissertation on the history of women in the Max Planck Society. In 2024, her book Hierarchies: The Max Planck Society in Gender Trouble was published open access (the German version was published open access in 2022). In 2025, she joined the Department on Knowledge Systems and Collective Life (Benson) at the MPIWG.

In her current research project, On Misogyny: Feminism, Foetuses and Femicides, she uses an epistemological approach to abortion to illustrate the connections between misogyny, authoritarianism and right-wing extremism.