Dr Alice Christensen

I am broadly interested in the cultural and intellectual history of nineteenth and twentieth century central Europe. 

I am working on a book about discussions of temperature in Europe between 1870 and 1930. Temperature served as a touchpoint for theories about measurement, as a set of cultural practices of control and regulation, and as material for thinking about how self and world touch. Temperature was a literary, scientific, and cultural obsession around 1900; see, for example, Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain.

Related to this project, I recently contributed a book chapter titled “Ernst Mach’s Inventory Numbers” to the edited volume Media Inventories of the Nineteenth Century (ed. Ilinca Iurascu, Petra McGillen, Sean Franzel).

In September 2022 I convened a conference at the British Academy, funded by the Wellcome Trust, on the history and future of human-animal relations, (post-)colonialism, and disease, with particular attention to one actor within this network: the mosquito.

I have also translated a number of essays from German into English for two forthcoming volumes on media theory and philosophy.