Anna-Maria Hünnes

since October 2024 
Library trainee at the Johann Christian Senckenberg University Library Frankfurt am Main (focus: collection coordination at Goethe University)

July 2020 – April 2022
Project assistant in the BMBF research network "Karten-Meere: Für eine Geschichte der Globalisierung vom Wasser aus" at the Centre for Transcultural Studies at the University of Erfurt

since January 2020
PhD scholarship holder, Junior Research Centre "Wissensgeschichte der Neuzeit", University of Erfurt

2019
Herzog-Ernst scholarship holder of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation at the Gotha Research Centre of the University of Erfurt

2016 – 2018
M.A. programme in Collection-Related History of Knowledge and Culture at the University of Erfurt

2012 – 2016
B.A. degree programme in Museology at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences

The Scientific Age in the Province. Research, Collecting and Presenting as Social Practices around 1900

With the first assembly of the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians in 1822, according to Werner von Siemens (1886), a 'scientific age' began, in which the natural sciences opened up to broader segments of the population and were no longer exclusively discussed within professional circles. 

The dissertation project examines how this opening of the sciences, as noted by Siemens, unfolded in the provinces. Despite spatial distance to universities and scientific circles in major cities, scientifically interested citizens gathered and organized themselves in associations. There, they pursued common efforts to promote knowledge and science. The practices and self-perception of these groups in the provinces are now to be examined in detail. Starting with the establishment of the Natural Science Association in Gotha in 1875, the aim is to determine what was understood as knowledge in bourgeois circles outside the metropolises at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century and how it was generated and received.

In addition to the social structure of the group, the practices of collaborative research, collecting, and presenting will be considered. Lectures, excursions, and high-profile projects formed the core of the association's activities, taking place in inns, museums, schools, local businesses, and nature. The topics discussed there provide insights into the self-perception of the actors as scientists. In addition, it will be determined how this self-perception was evaluated in the supra-regional scientific context. Overall, the work is intended to serve as a contrasting background to studies of metropolises as centers of the natural sciences and to provide another perspective on the province as a knowledge space.

• History of Knowledge and Science in the 19th and early 20th Century
• History of Museums and Collections

Spurenlesen. Die Dokumentationspraxis paläontologischer Funde in Gotha um 1900, in: Themenportal Europäische Geschichte, 26.01.2023. open access

„Versuche und Vorführungen. Unterhaltung durch technische Geräte im Naturwissenschaftlichen Verein Gotha ca. 1875-1912“ Research colloquium on the history of science together with the Tuesday Talks of the Centre for Transcultural Studies, 01 February 2022, University of Erfurt.

"Scientific Knowledge Moving through Town. Interwoven Spaces of Knowledge Production in^19th Century Gotha" at the^15th Annual Graduate Conference in European History (GRACEH) "Motions of Knowledge - Knowledge in Motion. Conceptualizing 'Knowledge Circulation' for Historical Research" 7-9 April 2021, University of Vienna.