How can people and animals live alongside each other? How should land and resources be distributed in society? People searched for answers to these questions in both literary and built utopias from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and utopian projects were ways of developing and testing out alternative models for society. The new designs for islands, settlements, cities, or mining projects that they contained were generally a response to criticism of contemporary conditions. I aim to show that non-human entities were part and parcel of such projects, though they have often been overlooked. Whether found in literature or implemented in practice, early modern schemes for better collective living are teeming with animals, plants, and minerals—as well as buildings and infrastructure designed to control them. In order to explore these kinds of utopian ecologies, which address humans in their relationships with organisms and infrastructures, I employ an approach based in transnational microhistory. My goal is to understand local utopian projects—whether a book, a mining project, or the founding of a new colonial city—in their global contexts.
Continue reading Life Squared: Early Modern Utopian EcologiesMonth: July 2026
Sexual Borderlands and Social Margins: Prostitution and Migration in West Germany, 1949–1989/1990
Before 28-year-old Olivia Packard walked up the steps of the Public Health Office on Neumarkt in Cologne on 23 November 1984, she had already worked as a prostitute in several German cities.1 Olivia was a British citizen. She had been born and raised in the mid 1950s near Epping Forest District, Essex, north-east of London. In 1982, she left the United Kingdom and migrated to the north of the Federal Republic of Germany to offer sexual services. A year later, she moved to Essen. There, and at times also in Cologne and Düsseldorf, she continued to work in prostitution. From 1984 onwards, she was employed at the Eros Centre at Hornstraße 2 in Cologne, one of the largest brothels in West Germany, later known as ‘Pascha’. At the end of the same year, in December 1984, she moved to Munich to continue her work there.2
Continue reading Sexual Borderlands and Social Margins: Prostitution and Migration in West Germany, 1949–1989/1990