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Rhiannon Hein

Profile picture for Rhiannon Hein

Contact Information

801 South Wright Street, 110 Coble Hall
M/C 322
Champaign, IL 61820
PhD Candidate, History

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, Hein is completing her dissertation, “Göttingen's Global Modernity: Cultures of Belonging in a Provincial German Town.” Her project investigates the variegated processes by which Göttingen citizens, by using periodization as a compass, mapped their local and regional place upon the modern globe. Here, the temporal metanarrative of the Enlightenment, which defined human history as a unilinear, universal march toward progress, provided the vocabulary for residents to relate themselves to collectives and to “Others.” She tracks these processes through the production of almanacs, collections of human bones, assembly of ethnographic curiosities, and the consumption of imported silk and satin: offering a kaleidoscopic view of residents’ efforts to find belonging within this strange and rapidly expanding world. 

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