Join us for the Annual Gerda Henkel Foundation Visiting Professorship Lecture 2025-26.
The lecture examines the persistence of colonial imaginations in German history, arguing that 19th‑century knowledge and practices established enduring frameworks shaping also our current polarized political debates.
The increasingly politicised public debates over colonial histories highlight social polarisation in our memory culture. In order to better understand this ongoing conflict, Anja Laukötter argues that we should take a historical look at the enduring persistence of colonial imaginations. Focusing on German history and using concrete examples, she shows how knowledge, thought patterns, experiences and practices in the nineteenth century already created the conditions and opportunities for the emergence of colonial imaginations, which could be invoked and updated later in history. She thus argues that this historical period was broader in its geographical and temporal scope than has previously been realised.
The Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship is a co-operation between the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the German Historical Institute London (GHIL), and the Gerda Henkel Professor’s home university.
Meet our speaker:
Professor Anja Laukötter, Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor Department of International History, LSE
Anja Laukötter has been a full professor of cultural history at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena since 2021. Previously she was a (senior) researcher at the research department “History of Emotions” at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (2010-2021). Anja Laukötter earned her Ph.D. in 2006 and her habilitation in 2018 at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She has studied modern and contemporary history, political sciences and cultural anthropology in Cologne, New York City and Berlin.
She has researched on the history of 19th and 20th Century European History, with focus on linkages between socio-political, cultural and history of science/knowledge perspectives. Within that framework she has focussed on the history of colonialism, its museums and collections as well as the history of the body, emotions and media (as photography, film, television). More recent she is interested in the history of truth and the history of imaginations in othering processes and democratic societies.
Meet our chair:
Professor Marc David Baer, Head of Department, Department of Internationanal History, LSE
Marc Baer is the Head of Department of International History at the LSE. He is an expert in Middle Eastern and European History, the Ottoman Empire, and Muslim-Jewish Relations. His most recent book is The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs, an international bestseller shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in 2022.
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