Institute for Economic and Social History

The Göttingen Institute represents a theoretically guided economic and social history in research and teaching, focusing primarily on the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. We focus on the history of consumption and business, as well as the history of globalization.

We offer students a bachelor's degree program in “Economic and Social History” and a master's degree program in “History of Global Markets.” In addition, we offer the Erasmus Mundus master's program “Global Markets, Local Creativities” (GLOCAL) in collaboration with the universities of Glasgow, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Uppsala, Kyoto, and Los Andes (Bogotá).

Prof. Dr. Hartmut Berghoff

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Publications

Reviewing Activities, Honorary Positions, and Memberships

News from the Institute

Research semester and visiting scholarship in the USA

In the Summer Semester 2025 and the Winter Semester 2025/26 Prof. Berghoff is on research leave funded by the German Research Foundation. He will therefore not offer any lectures and seminars. From June to August 2025, Prof. Berghoff will be a visiting researcher at the University of California San Diego in the USA.

Economic history linked to questions of the future - GLOCAL in the new issue of Uniinform (in German)

The latest issue of the Göttingen university newspaper uni|inform (page 4, in German) features an article on our institute's international Erasmus Mundus programme ‘Global Markets, Local Creativities’ (GLOCAL). The Master's programme analyses economic and social processes worldwide and combines economic and humanities perspectives on globalisation processes.

VW-Grant for Cooperative Research Project Göttingen and Haifa Universities (Institute for Econ. History, PD Dr. Jan Logemann)

The Ministry of Science and Culture and the Volkswagen Foundation (funding line zukunft.niedersachen) are supporting the collaborative research project “The World the Marketers Made: Choice Architects and the Business Origins of Behavioral Economics, 1960-2000” by Prof. Dr. Eli Cook (Haifa) and PD Dr. Jan Logemann (Institute for Economic and Social History, Göttingen). The project examines linkages in the development of behavioral economic theory and marketing practices since the 1960s and investigates the economic and social implications of an emerging “choice architecture” in the pre-digital age.

Former Göttingen doctoral student and employee at the Institute of Economic and Social History receives the Harold F. Williamson Prize

Christina Lubinski, Professor by now at the Copenhagen Business School, has received the Harold F. Williamson Prize from the american Business History Conference March 2025 on their yearly conference in Atlanta. The Prize is awarded for a “mid-career scholar who has made significant contributions to business history”. All the best from Göttingen!