Dr Kerstin Maria Pahl

Dr. Kerstin Maria Pahl is an interdisciplinary historian specializing in Western European and transatlantic intellectual and cultural history of the long eighteenth century. She is particularly interested in the history of individuality, subjectivity, and the self, political culture and the public sphere, print and book culture, and changing moral values. Her current book project traces the emergence of humanitarian thought in the late eighteenth century through egodocuments.

Kerstin Pahl is a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development as well as an associate researcher at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She holds a binational PhD in Art and Visual History from Humboldt University Berlin and King‘s College London, was visiting professor at Humboldt University Berlin, and was a Fulbright-funded visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies. She is a member of the German Young Academy, where she has served as a board member (2023-25), and represents the Young Academy on the board of the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities.

Her publications include The Visual Worlds of Life Writing: Portraits and Biographies in England, c. 1660 to 1780 (Liverpool University Press, 2025), the co-edited special issue "Changing the Feeling Rules: Emotional Norms in Social Relations from the Seventeenth Century to the Present", Social Science History 48, no. 4 (2024), and the forthcoming co-edited volume Citizens of the Enlightenment. Citoyens des Lumières (Paris: Honoré Champion). Her most recent articles have focused on practices of writing in high-stakes situations, including missionaries writing at sea and soldiers writing on the battlefield.