SFB member from 2021 until 2024
Roman Birke is a research associate at the Institute of History at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. His research focuses on international history of the 20th century with an emphasis on the history of international law and global population politics. After research stays at Columbia University New York, Trinity College Dublin, and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, he received his PhD from the University of Vienna in 2018. His 2020 book examines the importance of human rights ideas in discussions of global overpopulation since the 1940s. Drawing on this expertise, he is investigating property ideas in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic in a global context as part of the SFB. He is particularly interested in conflicts over expropriation and restitution and analyzes, for example, the significance of colonial property conflicts for the German Empire or the transition between aristocratic forms of property and new property relations in the Weimar Republic.
