Dr Emily Steinhauer - Teaching Fellow in Modern European History

I am an intellectual historian of modern Europe, especially twentieth century Germany. My research has focused on the experience of intellectuals in exile and transatlantic knowledge-exchanges during and after the Second World War. In particular, I have written on the development of the Frankfurt School in US-exile and West Germany, and the evolution of critical theory in the context of the Cold War.

I am interested in the role played by gender in the construction and development of intellectual cultures and processes of knowledge production. My new research project studies how preconceived notions of “intellectuals” and “intellectual labour” impacted the opportunities for women in early twentieth-century research communities, in particular in sociological and social-psychological networks. My work looks at a number of women with independent research-portfolios, tracing their establishment as intellectual figures in their own right and connecting their scholarly journeys to contextual parameters - from the role played by patronage to the impact mid-twentieth-century fascist persecution and exile had. 

On a methodological level, I am concerned with the parameters and challenges of women’s intellectual history, from the reconceptualisation of key concepts, such as our understanding of the role and character of ‘the intellectual’, to the recentering of the archive. This incorporates methodologies and questions from the history of knowledge and knowledge production, as well as the history of sociology. I am also interested in the intersection between history and literature in particular, and often work interdisciplinarily.