Biography

Moritz von Brescius is currently John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Centre for European Studies, Harvard University. He studied in Berlin, Oxford, Florence, and Cambridge. His doctoral dissertation was awarded several prizes. It was published as German Science in the Age of Empire: Enterprise, Opportunity and the Schlagintweit Brothers (Cambridge University Press, 2019, paperback 2020). He recently published articles in Modern Asian Studies, among other journals, and is a contributor to The Oxford World History of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). His research areas include the global history of science and empire and, increasingly, the environmental and economic history of plantation economies and the acclimatisation of cash crops as part of the global expansion of commodity frontiers. His new project is on the ‘synthetic age’ and resource regimes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An early iteration of this work was awarded the ‘Environment Award’ of the foundation Environment and Society at the University of Konstanz. In 2020, he was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellowship (2021-2025).