Deutsch

Lecturer

 

Contact:

Department of History
Grabengasse 3-5

Room 223 (2nd floor)

D-69117 Heidelberg

Phone: +49 (0) 6221-54 3974

Email: susann.liebich@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de

 

 

 

 

Susann Liebich joined the Professorship for Modern History at Heidelberg University as Assistant Professor in January 2020. She studied History, Media- and Communication Studies, and Psychology at Leipzig and Wellington, New Zealand, and completed her PhD with a book historical focus in 2012. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at James Cook University, Australia, for two years, before taking up a research fellowship at the Cluster of Excellence, “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”, at Heidelberg University in late 2014.

Her research interests include global book and media history, and the history of migration and mobility, increasingly in oceanic environments, with a geographical focus on the British Empire, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. Her dissertation was a cultural and social history of readers and reading in New Zealand and across the British Empire, c. 1890-1930; her first postdoctoral project investigated geographical imaginaries in Australian popular magazines of the interwar period. This project resulted in the collaborative monograph The Transported Imagination, published with Cambria Press in 2018. Her current project explores reading and writing at sea during the long nineteenth and the early twentieth century, and asks how literary practices shape and are shaped by the maritime environment and by the space of the ship, and how travel experiences are mediated by literary practices.

 

CV:

10/2017 – 02/2018	Contract Lecturer, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
12/2014 – 12/2019	Postdoctoral Fellow, Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”, Heidelberg University
05/2013 – 11/2014	Roderick Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Comparative Literature, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia
07/2012 – 11/2012	Contract Lecturer, History Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ
01/2012 – 06/2012	Postdoctoral Research Assistant, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ
12/2006 – 11/2011	Tutor, Teaching Assistant and Research Assistant, History Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ
05/2007 – 11/2011	PhD Candidate with stipend, History Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ
04/2006 – 04/2007	Host and Tour Guide, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, NZ
02/2006 – 11/2006	BA (Honours) in History, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ
12/2001 – 06/2004	Apprenticeship Bookseller (in parallel with studies in book studies), Halle/S.
10/1997 – 09/2003	M.A. in Communications- and Media Studies (Focus Book Studies), History, Psychology, Leipzig University

 

Selected Scholarships, Grants, Awards:

2018	Max Weber Foundation and Forum Transregional Studies, Weber World Café “Transoceanic Cultures: The Sea in Past and Present”
2016/2017	Resident Fellow, Stout Centre for New Zealand Studies, Victoria University of Wellington (04-05/2016 und 04-06/2017)
2016	Heidelberg University Mobility Grant, “Reading and Writing at Sea”
2014	Australian Govt. Anzac Centenary Local Grant, “Between Battles: Commemorating the Cultural Lives of Soldiers”
2012	New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage History Award, “Reading Culture and Community in Timaru, 1890-1939”
2012	The Zander & Durden Families Prize for best PhD thesis, VUW
2010	D.F. McKenzie Award
2009	Victoria University of Wellington Postgraduate Research Excellence Award
2009	McCorison Fellowship for the History and Bibliography of Printing in Canada and the United States, Bibliographical Society of America, “The Connected Reader - Reading Culture in New Zealand, Canada, Australia and the British World, c. 1890-1930”
2007-10	Bright Future Top Achiever Doctoral Scholarship by the NZ Government
2007	Kathleen Stewart Scholarship

 

Selected Publications:

• “A Sea of Fiction: The Libraries of Trans-Pacific Steamships at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” The Library 20, no.1 (2019), 4-28.

• “Popular imagination of the sea: magazines of the 1920s and 1930s.” In New Zealand and the Sea: Historical Perspectives, ed. Frances Steel, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2018, 256-273, 350-354.

• The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity, New York: Cambria, 2018. (Co-authored with Victoria Kuttainen and Sarah Galletly)

• “Introduction: Print Culture, Mobility and the Pacific, 1920-1950”, Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 7, no. 1 (2017): 26-33. (Co-authored with Victoria Kuttainen)

• “Worldly Tastes: Mobility and the Geographical Imaginaries of Interwar Australian Magazines.” Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 7, no. 1 (2017): 52-69. (Co-authored with Victoria Kuttainen)

• “Reading as War Effort: The National Home Reading Union during the First World War.” First World War Studies 6, no. 3 (2015): 219-238.

• “Letters to a Daughter: an archive of middle-class reading in New Zealand, c. 1872-1932.” In The History of Reading: International Perspectives, c. 1500-1990, eds. W.R. Owen and Shafquat Towheed, Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 163-177.

•  “‘The Books Are the Same as You See in London Shops’: Booksellers in Colonial Wellington and Their Imperial Ties, c. 1840-1890.” Script & Print 31, no. 4 (2007): 197-209.

Full list of publications

 

 

Course taught:

Winter term 2023/2024	Proseminar: Mobilität im globalen langen 19. Jahrhundert
	Übung: Narrative des Selbst: Theorien und Methoden im Umgang mit Egodokumenten
Summer term 2023	Übung: (Ant-)Arctic exploration: A cultural and literary history of the polar regions
	Übung: Texte und Ozeane: Seefahrt und Seereisen, ca. 1770–1930
	Exkursion: Exkursion ins Linden-Museum, Stuttgart
Winter term 2022/2023	Proseminar: Aotearoa Neuseeland und die Welt im langen 19. Jahrhundert
Summer term 2022	Übung: Foreign encounters: nineteenth-century travel writing and literature
	Übung: Fenster zur Moderne: Zeitschriften in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts in globaler Perspektive
Winter term 2021/2022	Übung: Kulturgeschichte des 1. Weltkrieges
	Übung: Geschichte(n) Schreiben: Schreibwerkstatt für Historiker*innen
Summer term 2021	Übung: Introduction to Book History: Theories, Approaches, Methods
	Übung: Blue Humanities and Oceanic Studies: Neuere Ansätze in der maritimen Geschichte
Winter term 2020/2021	Proseminar: Das Britische Empire und Siedlerkolonialismus im langen 19. Jahrhundert
Summer term 2020	Proseminar: Ozeane und maritime Welten im langen 19. Jahrhundert
Winter term 2019/2020	Übung: Narrative des Selbst: Theorien und Methoden im Umgang mit Egodokumenten