Prof. Dr. Christiane Schwab

Since May 2020, I have been running the research project Dissecting Society. Nineteenth-Century Sociographic Journalism and the Formation of Ethnographic and Sociological Knowledge. My enthusiasm for the historical connections between art, literature, and social research first began during my university studies, when I minored in Romance languages and literature. During a student stay in Spain, I learned about the Seville-born author José María Blanco White (1775–1841), who, after his emigration to England, wrote about cultural, political, and religious conditions in Spain in the New Monthly Magazine. In my master’s thesis, I analyzed the descriptive techniques and ethnographic contents of these “Letters from Spain” (1821) and their references to contemporary trends in social thought. After my doctoral thesis in urban studies, I revisited my research on the “Letters from Spain”, conducting a project on similar forms of “social sketches” in a European and transatlantic context funded by the German Research Foundation from 2016 to 2020 (Emmy Noether program). The project underway since May 2020, Dissecting Society. Nineteenth-Century Sociographic Journalism and the Formation of Ethnographic and Sociological Knowledge, expands the view on the historical connections between popular media and social research and explores alternative contexts and strands of early ethnographic and (micro-)sociological knowledge production during the long nineteenth century. In this research context, I have published a number of articles, among others, in the journals History and Anthropology, Urban History, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, and edited the volume Skizzen, Romane, Karikaturen. Populäre Genres als soziographische Wissensformate im 19. Jahrhundert (see the project’s publication list).