Eleonor Marcussen

Eleonor Marcussen is a Researcher in History in the Department of Cultural Sciences and member of Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (LNUCC). She joined LNU as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2018.

2019/20 she was an MWK-COFUND Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt) at the University of Erfurt.

Her current research project is funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet): Tracks through nature – the railways and environmental consequences of colonial infrastructure in India, c. 1860-1870 

At LNU she teaches the courses Criticism and Theory: Current debates in the Humanities (Autumn 2021) and Colonial histories and postcolonial theory: concurrences as historical methodology (Spring 2022).

Previously she has taught World History as an Assistant Professor in History at North South University in Dhaka, Bangladesh (2017-2018) 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 holds a PhD in South Asian History from Heidelberg University in Germany where 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', funded by the German Research Council. 
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 her forthcoming book (under contract with Cambridge University Press) 'Acts of Aid: Politics of Relief and Reconstruction in the 1934 Bihar-Nepal Earthquake', she 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, her interests include the perceptions of risk, the introduction of new building technologies, humanitarianism and the politicalization of disasters.