Anka Steffen
Visiting Scholar, Fall 2019, WIGH
PhD Candidate in History, Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)
PhD Candidate in History, Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)
Anka Steffen is a historian of Silesian (and Prussian) long-term socio-economic history, of early modern Atlantic trade and of processes of globalization in an entangled world. She is interested in the integration of (East-)Central Europe into broader narratives of Atlantic and Global history.
Anka Steffen was born in Leipzig (Germany), but grew up in Poland. She studied Cultural and Social Sciences (BA), before she completed her MA-degree in European Cultural History at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/O. (Germany). She is pursuing her PhD within a broader research project financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) “The Globalized Periphery: Atlantic Commerce, Socioeconomic and Cultural Change in Central Europe (1680-1850)”. Her doctoral research emphasizes questions of interconnectedness, making (East-)Central Europe in general, and the Silesian linen production area specifically, visible as regions tightly interwoven into the very fabric of the early modern Atlantic and global economy. She addresses the interdependency of developments that took place overseas with those that happened on a local level. She uses sources in multiple languages discovered mainly in archives in Poland, Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands.
Anka Steffen’s research has been funded by numerous bodies, such as the German Historical Institute in Warsaw (Poland) and Washington D.C. (USA) She was awarded a scholarship of the Viadrina International Program for Graduates (financed by the German Academic Exchange Service -DAAD - and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research) for a stay the University of Hertfordshire and archival research in London (UK). She previously received a fellowship at the Leibniz-Institute of European History in Mainz (Germany).
Key publications:
“Spinning and Weaving for the Slave Trade: Proto-Industry in Eighteenth-Century Silesia”, Anka Steffen and Klaus Weber, in: Slavery Hinterland. Transatlantic Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680-1850, ed. by Felix Brahm and Eve Rosenhaft, Boydell & Brewer, Suffolk, 2016, S. 87-107.
“A Fierce Competition! Silesian Linens and Indian Cottons on the West-African Coast in the Late 17th and Early 18th Century”, in: Central and Eastern Europe in a Rethinking of the Atlantic World, 1680-1860, ed. by Jutta Wimmler and Klaus Weber, Boydell & Brewer, (up-coming 2019).
“A Cloth that Binds – New Perspectives on the Eighteenth-century Prussian Economy”, Slavery & Abolition, (up-coming 2020).