I am a cultural historian of the early modern world with an interest in the history of information. After studies in Basel and Munich, I finished my PhD in Modern History at the University of St Andrews in 2022. My dissertation was funded by the AHRC and traced the reuse of books and manuscripts among early modern German academics as a form of ‘secondhand scholarship’. During my doctoral studies, I was also a visiting fellow at FU Berlin and Harvard, where I had the opportunity to study early modern scholarly manuscripts at Berlin State Library and Houghton Library.

My current project looks at information brokers during the Enlightenment. I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh in 2023, where I had the chance to study the „paper tools“ of the Scottish minister and mathematician Colin Campbell of Achnaba (1644-1726), who repurposed the paper of the letters he received, while holding an intermediary position in Scotland’s fractured confessional culture after 1689. Together with Richard Oosterhoff (Edinburgh), I co-organised the conference Brokering the Enlightenment: Scotland and the World at IASH in Edinburgh in June 2023.

At the University of Basel, I am a postdoctoral researcher on the project SwissBritNet: Swiss-British cultural exchange and knowledge networks 1600-1780. My project focuses on the mobility of Swiss ministers in the long eighteenth century who did not find work in the Swiss Confederacy and moved to England to take up posts as chaplains, secretaries, librarians, tutors or translators. The chaplains thus acted as go-betweens at the intersection of confessional, political and intellectual networks of information. In collaboration with the hallerNet project at the University of Bern, I am preparing a data edition of the chaplains’ correspondence.

Together with Anja-Silvia Goeing (Harvard, Munich) and Yuval Givon (Harvard), I also co-organise a peer seminar on Zoom. Our Global Information History Workshop meets once a month to hear work-in-progress papers and to discuss readings on the history of information. I am also a contributing editor for the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog published by University of Pennsylvania Press.