Profile
Abstract
Ruth Nattermann has been Principal Investigator of the DFG-funded project "Transnational Humanitarianism and Refugee Policy in the Age of World Wars. A Relational History between Political Actors and Humanitarian Activists" at the Leipzig Research Centre Global Dynamics (ReCentGlobe) since April 2024. In 2021, she was Acting Professor at the University of Bielefeld, Chair in Modern History and Gender History. She has been Associate Professor (Privatdozentin) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich, Chair of Modern and Contemporary History, since Wintersemester 2019/20.
Ruth Nattermann’s Habilitation (LMU Munich, 2018) was funded by the DFG and the Max Weber Foundation at the German Historical Institute in Rome and the LMU Munich. Her book on "Jüdinnen in der frühen italienischen Frauenbewegung 1861-1945" (De Gruyter, 2020) was awarded the prize ‘Geisteswissenschaften International’ and published in English by Springer International - Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.
Ruth Nattermann's research and publications focus on German, Italian, European and European-Jewish history from the 19th to the 21st century in their transnational and global contexts, with a particular interest in gender history, comparative history of fascisms and Italian fascism, Italian-Jewish and German-Jewish history.
Her current DFG-funded project on "Transnational Humanitarianism and Refugee Policy in the Age of World Wars" focuses on protagonists of humanitarian aid and refugee policy from the end of the First World War to the early period of the Cold War. The thematic-geographical focus lies on Italy, Southern Europe and the Mediterranean as an important transit sphere for Jewish migration to Palestine, and as a place of origin for fascist regimes and colonial forms of rule in North Africa. Another accent is on the role of the Catholic Church, the Vatican and international Catholic circles in humanitarian organizations and initiatives.
The most important source material are hitherto largely unexplored ego-documents of the persons involved. The source-critical approach accentuates the innovative potential of an actor-centred perspective. The focus on ego-documents also emphasizes gender-historical questions that have lately come to the fore in humanitarian history.
The project is designed as a contribution to transnational and global history, to the new history of humanitarianism and to the history of migration. The results will be published in a monograph.