Diversity and difference are at the heart of Benno Gammerl’s work. Before he joined the EUI in Florence as Professor for the History of Gender and Sexuality, he helped to establish the Centre for Queer History at Goldsmiths, University of London. Prior to that, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development’s Centre for the History of Emotions and at the Freie Universität in in Berlin. His PhD asked how ethnically diverse populations were governed in the Habsburg and the British Empire. His most recent book “anders fühlen” traces the emotional lives of gays and lesbians in West Germany since the 1950s. Gammerl engages with postcolonial and feminist theories, queer approaches, oral history methods and the history of emotions. And he puts the voices of those people centre stage who face discrimination and who strive for justice and recognition.

Publications:

Sexotic. The Interplay Between Sexualization and Exoticization, edited with Ulrike Schaper, Magdalena Beljan, Pascal Eitler and Christopher Ewing, Sexualities, 23 (2020). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1363460718790863

anders fühlen: Schwules und lesbisches Leben in der Bundesrepublik. Eine Emotionsgeschichte, Muenchen: Hanser 2021. https://www.hanser-literaturverlage.de/buch/anders-fuehlen/978-3-446-26928-6/