Thomas Maissen

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Thomas Maissen (2019)

Thomas Maissen (born October 23, 1962 in Zurich ) is a Swiss historian . Maissen taught from 2004 to 2013 as a full professor for modern history with a focus on early modern times at Heidelberg University . Since September 2013 he has been director at the German Historical Institute in Paris .

Life

Thomas Maissen, son of a Swiss and a Finnish woman , attended primary schools in Toronto , Zurich and Basel from 1968 to 1973 and the humanistic grammar school in Basel from 1973 to 1981 . There he obtained his Matura in 1981 . From 1981 to 1989 he studied history, Latin and philosophy at the universities of Basel , Rome and Geneva . For him, important academic teachers were Alfred Bürgin and František Graus . From 1989 to 1993 Maissen received several scholarships that made research stays in Naples, Paris, Venice and Florence possible. In 1993 he received his doctorate with Hans Rudolf Guggisberg in Basel with the thesis The French Past with Italian Authors of the 15th and 16th Centuries . From 1993 to 1995 he was a research assistant to Luise Schorn-Schütte at the University of Potsdam . From 1996 to 2004 he worked for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung for historical analysis . In 2002 he completed his habilitation with Bernd Roeck at the University of Zurich with the thesis The Birth of the Republic. Understanding of the state and representation in the early modern Confederation . From 2002 to 2004 Maissen held an SNSF professorship at the University of Lucerne . From the winter semester 2004/05 to 2013 he taught as a full professor for modern history with a focus on early modern times at Heidelberg University. Since September 1, 2013, he has been the first non-German to head the German Historical Institute Paris (DHIP) and is on leave of absence from Heidelberg University for ten years. Under his leadership, the geographic focus of the DHIP expanded from 2013. In 2015, the DHIP started a cooperation with the University of Dakar and founded the research group on Sub-Saharan Africa The Bureaucratisation of African Societies .

Maissen has been a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg since 2006 . In 2007 he founded the Heidelberg Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HGGS), which he headed as speaker until 2012. From 2008 to 2013 he also worked as the founder and coordinator of the integrated international master’s degree in history with the École des hautes études en sciences sociales Paris. Since 2008 he has held various leading positions in the DFG - Cluster of Excellence (EHESS) "Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows", most recently in 2013 (until August) as co-director. In 2009 he was visiting professor at the EHESS in Paris and in 2010 he was visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , New Jersey. From 2012 to 2013 he was a fellow at the Marsilius Kolleg at Heidelberg University.

Maissen is a Swiss-Finnish citizen . He is married with four children and lives in Saint-Cloud .

Research priorities

His main research interests are the history of historiography , the history of (state) political thought , the history of mentality , images of history , the history of Switzerland as well as the history of education and schools . As a result of his work at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , he created an illustrated book on Switzerland during World War II, two books on newspaper history and the depiction Denied Memory , published in 2005 . Dormant Assets and the Swiss World War I Debate 1989–2004 . In his dissertation published in 1994 on the interest in France's past during the Italian Renaissance, he was able to work out, among other things, that the French kings around 1500, with the help of Italian court historians, tried to upgrade their own history according to humanistic standards. Together with Michael Kempe , he published a description of the first German-speaking educational societies in Zurich in the decades around 1700.

His habilitation, published in 2006, dealt with the question “when and why a republican self-image emerged in Switzerland that deserves this name”. In 2013 Maissen published a brief introduction to the history of the early modern period . In his Swiss Heldengeschichten (2015) he confronted excerpts from speeches by the prominent SVP politicians Christoph Blocher and Ueli Maurer with the current state of research, triggering a debate in the Swiss media that has also been referred to as the “Swiss historians' dispute”.

Fonts (selection)

Monographs

Editorships

Web links

literature

  • Inaugural address by Thomas Maissen at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences on July 21, 2007. In: Yearbook of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences for 2007, Heidelberg 2008, pp. 148–150.

Remarks

  1. ↑ See the reviews by Bodo Guthmüller in: Wolfenbütteler Renaissance Mitteilungen 19 (1995), pp. 138–140; Heribert Müller in: Historische Zeitschrift 262 (1996), pp. 233-236; Lorenz Böninger in: Archivio Storico Italiano 154 (1996), p. 406f .; Frank Collard in: Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 58 (1996), pp. 236-240; Daniela Neri in: Francia 23/2 (1996), pp. 255-257 ( online ); Marc Smith in: Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes 154 (1996), pp. 682-685; Thomas F. Mayer in: Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997), pp. 580-582; Jacques Bousquet in: Revue Historique 297 (1997), pp. 623f .; Wolfgang Reinhard in: Società e Storia 75 (1997), pp. 185f .; Helmut Zedelmaier in: Historisches Jahrbuch 119 (1999), p. 433f.
  2. ↑ Thomas Maissen's curriculum vitae at the German Historical Institute in Paris . Retrieved January 20, 2019 (PDF).
  3. ↑ Thomas Maissen: From the legend to the model. Interest in France's past during the Italian Renaissance. Basel 1994.
  4. ↑ See the reviews of Ursula Pia Jauch in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung 132, June 11, 2002, p. 59; Roman Luckscheiter in: Frankfurter Rundschau , August 27, 2002; Detlef Döring, in: sehepunkte 2 (2002), No. 11 [15. November 2002]; Monika Gisler in: Bulletin. Swiss Society for Research in the 18th Century , No. 21, December 2002, pp. 34–36; Joachim Whaley in: The British journal for eighteenthcentury studies 26 (2003); Holger Böning in: Yearbook for Communication History 5 (2003), p. 229; Karl Hildebrandt in: Francia 30/2 (2003), pp. 293-295 ( online ); Karlheinz Gerlach in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft 52 (2004), pp. 185f.
  5. ↑ Thomas Maissen: The Birth of the Republic. Understanding of the state and representation in the early modern Confederation. Göttingen 2006, p. 14. Cf. also the discussions by Clausdieter Schott in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , January 17, 2007, p. 46; Sebastian Bott in: Pro Saeculo XVIIIo. Societas helvetica , 30 (2007), pp. 45-49; Inken Schmidt-Voges in: Sehepunkte 7 (2007), No. 6 [15.06.2007], ( online ); Thomas Lau in: H-Soz-u-Kult , October 16, 2007, ( online ); Caspar Hirschi in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 6, 2008; Christian Windler in: Rechtsgeschichte 12 (2008), pp. 191–193; Peter Blickle in: Historische Zeitschrift 286 (2008), pp. 187–190; André Krischer in: Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 1/2008, pp. 127–131; Louis Carlen in the magazine of the Savigny Foundation for Legal History 125 (2008); Nicolette Mout in: Francia Recensio 2008/3, ( online ); Bettina Braun in: Swiss Journal for History 58 (2008), pp. 468–471 ( online ); Randolph Head in: H-Net Reviews , June 2009, ( online ); Collective review by Marc H. Lerner: The Search for the Origins of Modern Democratic Republican Political Thought in Early Modern Switzerland. In: Modern Intellectual History 8 (2011), pp. 647-658.
  6. ↑ Thomas Maissen: History of the Early Modern Age. Munich 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Maissen, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 23, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich