Contact Information
M/C 322
Champaign, IL 61820
Biography
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 with a BA in History and English from the University of Alabama in 2018. Her work at the University of Illinois has won the History Department’s Joseph Ward Swan Prize as well as an Honorable Mention for the Humanities Research Institute's Prize for Research. Her newest publication can be found in the forthcoming edition of Feminist German Studies (fall/winter 2023).
Research Interests
- Modern Germany
- History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
- History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
- History of Nationalism, Empire
Research Description
With the support of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, Hein is now completing her dissertation, “Göttingen’s Global Modernity: Cultures of Belonging in a Provincial German Town, 1775-1815.” Her work examines Germans’ constitution of local and regional identity through their entanglements with foreign empires at the turn of the nineteenth century. Using the small town of Göttingen as a case study, she argues that Germans’ efforts to map their belonging in a globalizing world became inextricably bound to their periodization of European modernity in the Sattelzeit era.
Education
M.A. in History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, December 2020.
B.A. in History and English, University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, May 2018.
Grants
Gerda Henkel Stiftung Research Scholarship, 2021-2023
Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (German), 2020-2021
Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (German), 2019
Charles Grayson Summersell Memorial Scholarship (Univ. Alabama), 2018
Awards and Honors
Honorable Mention, HRI Prizes for Research in the Humanities, 2021
Joseph Ward Swain Prize for outstanding seminar paper, 2020
UIUC Teachers Ranked as Excellent, 2019-2020
Courses Taught
HIST 141: Western Civilization from Antiquity to 1660, 2018-2019
HIST 100: Introduction to Global History, summer 2022
HIST 349: Age of Revolutions, fall 2023