Eleonor Marcussen

Eleonor Marcussen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in History in the Department of Cultural Sciences and member of Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (LNUCC).

During the winter semester 2020/21 she is also Associate Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt) where she was a MWK-COFUND Fellow 2019/20.

Previously she has taught World History as an Assistant Professor in History at North South University in Dhaka, Bangladesh (2017-2019) and been a Junior Research Fellow at the School of Ecology and Environment Studies at Nalanda University in Bihar and New Delhi (2013-2014).

She received her PhD in South Asian History from the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University in Germany. Before starting her doctoral research, she studied Hindi, History of Religions and South Asian studies at Uppsala University and Lund University in Sweden.
At Heidelberg University her doctoral research was conducted in the research group 'Cultures of Disaster: Shifting Asymmetries Between Societies, Cultures, and Nature from a Comparative Historical and Transcultural Perspective' in the Cluster of Excellence 'Asia and Europe in a Global Context'. 
Related to the doctoral research project, she taught the course 'Natural Disasters in Late Colonial South Asia: Perceptions, Interpretations and Reactions' at the Department of History of the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University.

In my forthcoming book (under contract with Cambridge University Press) 'Acts of Aid: Politics of Relief and Reconstruction in the Aftermath of the 1934 Bihar-Nepal Earthquake', I examine the organization of relief and reconstruction work by civil society and the state in India in the 1930s. In the field of historical disaster research, my interests span from the perceptions of risk to the introduction of new building technologies, humanitarianism and the politicalization of disaster aftermaths.