On September 29, 2026, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) welcomed its fourth cohort of doctoral students at the IMPRS. The event offered the new cohort a chance to meet fellow IMPRS students, members of the teaching faculty, and MPIWG colleagues.

After opening remarks by the IMPRS speakers Christine von Oertzen (MPIWG/Humboldt Universität Berlin), Caterina Schürch (Technische Universität Berlin), and Etienne Benson (MPIWG), the four incoming doctoral students delivered engaging elevator pitches on their research projects.

The event continued with a reception, followed by a workshop led by Christine von Oertzen. Drawing on a prior reading of Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse, the workshop related the notion of resources to the projects situated within the IMPRS, considering it both as subject of inquiry and analytical method. It also introduced the new cohort to the work of their fellow doctoral students and members of the teaching faculty, while situating their projects within the broader intellectual framework of the research school.


List of the new doctoral fellows’ dissertation projects

• Alejandra Borea de la Portilla – Listening to Breakdown: Infrastructural Disruption and the Public Perception of Danger in Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict (1980–2000)
• Felix Brieden – Epistemologies of Alienation: Detours of Gestalt Theory through Exile and Resistance (1930–1960)
• Tjark Nentwig – Flexibilization through Work from Home? History of Telework in (West) Germany and France, 1960–present
• Yuqi Zhang – Experiments Under Pressure: Chinese Materia Medica and the Making of Modern Pharmacology in China, 1920s–1970s

Learn more about the third cohort of doctoral students and their projects here.