Malin Sonja Wilckens
Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Dr Malin Sonja Wilckens is a historian specialising in Modern Europe and its global entanglements. Her research encompasses the history of science and knowledge, historical ‘race’ studies, and environmental humanities. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, where she works on two projects: the first examining the European Matchstick Industry, concentrating on the relationship between Britain and Sweden within colonial, imperial, and global contexts, including environmental, labour, and knowledge histories; the second investigating scientific practices related to human differentiation from prehistory to the present. Prior to her position in Mainz, she was a research assistant in global history at the University of Bielefeld and the University of Kiel, as well as a member of the Collaborative Research Centre “Practices of Comparing” in Bielefeld.
Wilckens wrote her dissertation on skull-based racialisation processes in comparative anatomy and anthropology (1780–1880). For her dissertation, she was awarded the Johannes Zilkens PhD prize 2025 by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. She has published on essentialising practices in the handling of human remains and their historical attributions, as well as valorisation practices, alongside historiographical and methodological questions in ‘race’ studies.
Research Project
Ordering (More-Than-)Humankind
Human Differentiation from Prehistory to the Present
Following up on her PhD project in the history of science, where she worked on practices of collecting and comparing skulls in comparative anatomy from the late 18th century to the late 19th century, her project at UCL and the German Historical Institute centres on the history of human development at the intersection of the humanities and natural sciences, covering the period from the 18th century to the present. The focus of the project, for which she is the co-PI (with Johannes Paulmann) in a DFG Collaborative Research Centre, is on the history of the emerging disciplines that have distinguished and classified prehistoric humans (Hominins) and described their coexistence and evolutionary history based on fossil and material evidence. The project particularly examines the temporality, spatiality, and relationality of these differentiations.
Central questions include: How did archaeology and other sciences distinguish early human species from later human species and from contemporaneous hominid species? What role did scientific, political, or colonial power relations play in taxonomy? How did they perceive the relationships between humans-humans, humans-animals, humans-environment, and humans-transcendence, and how did they explain the interactions among these different relationships? What role did racialised conceptions of the body play in representing various human types? The project thus connects with discussions on knowledge, collecting, paleoarchaeological research, museum studies, and questions concerning the Anthropocene, ‘race’, and racism.
Recent Publications (selection)
Schädelvergleiche und die Ordnung der Welt. Die Konstruktion von ‚Rasse‘ in der Vergleichenden Anatomie (1780–1880), Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen, to be published in 2025/2026).
Julian T. D. Gärtner/Malin S. Wilckens (ed.), Racializing Humankind. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Practices of ‘Race’ and Racism (Wien/Köln, 2022).
More information on the Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellowship