People

Christine von Oertzen

Principal Investigator (Since 2005)

Prof. Dr.

Christine von Oertzen has published widely on gender relations in society and science and the material culture of collecting, processing, and visualizing data. Her recent publications include Beyond the Academy: Histories of Gender and Knowledge, Data Histories (with Elena Aronova and David Sepkoski), Working With Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge (with Carla Bittel and Elaine Leong), and Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge, all products of MPIWG Working Groups.

Her first monograph explored gender politics and social change in West Germany. The focus of her second book 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.

Her current research group Data, Media, Mind combines a focus on data epistemologies and the material culture of data with media and gender studies, environmental and supply chain studies, the history of bureaucracy, the social, human, and cognitive sciences, and citizen science.

She has earned her PhD at the Free University of Berlin, has taught at the Technical Universities of Berlin and Braunschweig, and was a research scholar at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. In 2020, she was appointed professor of media practices in the Media Studies Department at Berlin’s Humboldt Universität. She is also one of the Speakers of the new International Max Planck Research School “Knowledge and Its Resources,” a PhD program which opened with the first cohort of students in September 2022.

Current Projects

Technologies of Self Inscription
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Completed Projects

Beyond the Academy
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At-Home Observation
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Gender Studies of Science
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Historicizing Big Data
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History of Bureaucratic Knowledge
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Housewifery Skills and Paper Technologies in Census Compilation
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Machineries of Data Power
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Machines of Memory
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Politics of Epistemic Technologies
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Science, Gender, Internationalism
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Sciences of the Archive
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Working with Paper
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Selected Publications

Tkaczyk, Viktoria and Christine von Oertzen (2023). “Introduction: Reconsidering the Resources of Epistemic Tools.” Isis 114 (2): 359–365. https://doi.org/10.1086/724796.

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Oertzen, Christine von (2023). “Paper Knowledge and Statistical Precision.” Isis 114 (2): 380–386. https://doi.org/10.1086/724775.

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Oertzen, Christine von and Viktoria Tkaczyk, eds. (2023). Focus: Supplied Knowledge: Resource Regimes, Materials, and Epistemic Tools. Special issue, Isis 114 (2). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/isis…

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Oertzen, Christine von and Lotte Schüßler (2022). “Für, mit und auf Papier: Papiertechnologien und ihre Versorgungsketten.” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 14 (2): 119–136. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/18949.

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Oertzen, Christine von (2007). The pleasure of a surplus income : part-time work, gender politics, and social change in West Germany, 1955-1969. New York [u.a.]: .

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Oertzen, Christine von (1999). Teilzeitarbeit und die Lust am Zuverdienen. Geschlechterpolitik und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in der Bundesrepublik, 1948–1969. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht.

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Oertzen, Christine von (2007). “Völkerverständigung durch akademische Vernetzung : die International Federation of University Women 1919-1945.” In Politische Netzwerkerinnen : internationale Zusammenarbeit von Frauen 1830-1960, ed. E. Schöck-Quinteros, A. Schüler, A. Wilmers, and K. Wolff, 333–356. Berlin: Trafo.

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UWIND Database

Bookshelf

Forschungsthemen

Presentations, Talks, & Teaching Activities

The Here and Now in Numbers: Census Compilation and Data Visualization in Nineteenth-Century Prussia

Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica,Taiwan

https://www2.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/bulletinDetail.php?TM=1&M=1&C=1&bid=1310
The Many Hands that Work with Paper: Towards a Socio-Material History of Knowledge

College of Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei

http://www.science.ntu.edu.tw/speechDetail_en.php?SpeechId=7084
Papier als Werkzeug: Eine soziomaterielle Geschichte des Wissens

Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Kulturwissenschaften, Ringvorlesung "Schrift/Bild/Sound"

https://www.schriftbildsound.de/.../Schrift.+Bild.Sound+Programm....