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 19^th and 20^th 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.