Rhiannon Hein

Rhiannon Hein is a PhD candidate in Modern German History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was born and raised in Honolulu, HI and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Alabama in 2018 with a BA in History and English. Supported in part by the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, her work at the University of Illinois has won the Joseph Ward Swan Prize for outstanding seminar paper and an Honorable Mention for the Humanities Research Institute's Prize for Research. 

With the support of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Hein is now conducting research for her dissertation, “A Provincial Cosmos: German Towns, Gowns, and the Making of Modernity, 1775-1848.” Her project investigates the interplay between regionalism, nationalism, and globalism in the towns and gowns of Göttingen and Jena, two of the leading universities in the late Enlightenment and early Romantic German lands. Framing the towns as spaces of transit and exchange embedded in foreign imperial networks, her research explores the transcultural nature of German identity and belonging at the turn of the nineteenth century.