Eleonor Marcussen

Senior Lecturer in History (Department of Cultural Sciences) and member of Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (LNUCC).

I first joined LNU as a guest researcher and soon thereafter as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2018, and again as a researcher from 2020 until June 2024. Before joining LNU, I taught World History as an Assistant Professor in History at North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2017-2018).

2019/20 I was fortunate to spend a year stay at the MWK-COFUND Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt), University of Erfurt.

I hold a PhD in South Asian History from Heidelberg University (Germany) where my 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', funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). 

Over the years I have received several scholarships and fellowships as a doctoral student, among them being an intern at the League of Nations Archives (UNOG, 2011-2012) working with reseearch guides and digitization of archival collections, and a Junior Research Fellow at the School of Ecology and Environment Studies at Nalanda University in Bihar and New Delhi (2013-2014).

Acts of Aid: Politics of Relief and Reconstruction in the 1934 Bihar–Nepal Earthquake examines 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, her interests include the perceptions of risk, the introduction of new building technologies, humanitarianism and the politicalization of disasters.

The book is available in Open Access as an e-book in the LNU repository DiVA or to download chapter-wise from Cambridge Core.    

Reviews:

• Review by Uma Pradhan (University College of London), Studies in Nepal History and Society, SINHAS, vol. 29, no. 1 (2024).  
• Review by Vipul Singh (University of Delhi and Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich) Environment and History, vol 30, no. 4 (2024).
• Review by Joanna Simonow (Heidelberg University), H-Soz-Kult (11.09.2023).

I'm a member of Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (LNUCC). I first visited the centre as a guest researcher in 2018 and soon thereafter joined as a postdoctoral fellow in the project "Huseby in the World" (Funded by the Kamprad Family Foundation, PI Gunnel Cederlöf).

An outome of the project Huseby in the World is the anthology The Imperial Underbelly: Workers, Contractors, and Entrepreneurs in Colonial India and Scandinavia (Ed. Gunnel Cederlöf; Routledge) in 2022 (OpenAccess Gold).

• Review by Klas Rönnbäck (University of Gothenburg), Historisk Tidskrift 144:3 (2024): 579-582. (in Swedish)
• Review by Silke Neunsinger (Uppsala University / The Swedish Labour Movement's Archives and Library): "I imperiets undervegetation: Vardagslivet i det koloniala Indien och Småland", Arbterarhistoria, Nr 185-186 (2023:1-2)

At LNUC Concurrences I'm the coordinator of the research cluster Colonial Connections and Comparisons together with Eleonora Poggio. In addition to the research activities we collaborate in the organisation of seminars and workshops for the master's programme in Colonial and postcolonial studies and the Gradaute School in Global Humanities which Poggio is the coordinator of.