Dr. Amir Theilhaber

Academic Assistant to the Director

amir.theilhaberuni-potsdam.de

Amir Theilhaber is research associate and assistant to the director at the Moses Mendelssohn Center and a post doc researcher (Habilitation) affiliated with the Department of History at the Bielefeld University. Theilhaber’s research interests include entanglements of modern Middle Eastern and European history, new diplomatic and political history, transregional intellectual and cultural history, transnational Jewish history, and everything microhistory.

His current project is titled “The ethnological collection of the Lippisches Landesmuseum in peripheral Detmold. A glocal history of conglomeration, fragmentation, indifference and contestation from 1835 to the present.” Find a detailed description here.

Theilhaber completed his BA in International Affairs at Vesalius College – Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2006), his MA in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University Jerusalem (2009), and his PhD in History at the Technical University Berlin in 2018 (summa cum laude). He is the author of a book on the German Orientalist scholar and foreign minister Friedrich Rosen (De Gruyter, 2020) and the connections of Orientalist scholarship and international politics during the age of empire.

His studies were supported by a Rothberg Family Scholarship, a Leo-Baeck Fellowship, a PhD scholarship of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volks, a DAAD Promoting German Studies grant for a fellowship at Birkbeck College (2015), and a DAAD travel grant for a conference/resarch trip to Delhi and Lucknow (2018). He was awarded the Gold Meir Prize, and the conversion of his PhD dissertation into a book was supported by the LWL, the Landesverband Lippe, and the Open Access fund of the TU Berlin.

He taught courses on the Aryan myth in global contexts at the Center for Antisemitism Studies at the TU Berlin and at the European Summer University for Jewish Studies in Hohenems. He was a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC (2019/2020) and lead investigator of a research project on the provenances of the ethnological collections of the Lippisches Landesmuseum Detmold (supported by the German Lost Art Foundation).

Theilhaber has worked as a bartender in Belgium and in a laundromat on a kibbutz in the Galilee. He managed a legal aid clinic for refugees from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan in Cairo (2010-2011), and built up admissions and student services at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin (2014-2016). He's been an interviewer for the Archiv der Flucht at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and worked on the Antisemitism module of the permanent exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin.