Research

Current book project:

"Paper War: The Nazi Workbook and the Government of Labour in Germany"

My book manuscript, almost entirely based on post-doc research, takes the sprawling and (during Nazism) criminal labour administration as a case study to draw out some broader hypotheses on the relationships between state-building, information management, and bureaucratic authority from the late Weimar Republic, over the Nazi regime and Allied occupation, to 1960s West Germany.
Its main focus is the massive, paper-based information system around the so-called labour pass [Arbeitsbuch] and the corresponding card files, introduced from 1935. See the project outline (written for my research scholarship at Deutsches Museum in 2018) for the main argument and some more info on the historical semantics of "paper war".

A special issue proposal entitled "Quantifying Virtues and Vices: Personas and Statistical Practice 1800-1950" is currently on ice, as are two papers that grew out of my PhD research, and which I hope will form the basis for my second book:

• "When Taxonomists Strike Back: the German Statistical Field c.1880-1935" applies the Bourdieusian notion of scholarly fields to German-speaking statistical science at the turn of the last century. I take up work undertaken by T. Porter and A. Oberschall thirty years ago on an increasing split around 1880 between mathematical and social scientific concerns in German statistics and show how that split deepened and led to an almost complete marginalization of mathematically trained statisticians from mainstream statistical activities both within universities and statistical offices even before World War One.
  A summer visiting fellowship at Centre Marc Bloch in 2014 allowed me to gather data on this from two first-rate academic statistical journals and related material.
  
• A smaller project on the curious career of German statistician Paul Flaskämper (1886-1979) combines the 'field' analysis mentioned above with biography. "Weimar Culture and Social Statistics: The Life of Paul Flaskämper (1886-1979)" takes Flaskämper's somewhat astounding intellectual trajectory from plant morphology to natural philosophy of life and social statistics to re-examine some recurrent themes in the history of early twentieth-century German science. Besides, I am hoping to be able to shed light on the intellectual origins of the 'Frankfurt school' of statistics, a major center of statistical science and teaching in West Germany until the recent past, co-founded by Flaskämper in the 1920s and 1930s.
  This project received funding from the British Society for the History of Science in whose Viewpoint magazine I have published a biographical sketch of Flaskämper's statistical life.