Timm Schönfelder

Timm Schönfelder is a Doctoral Researcher specializing in environmental and technological history at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), working within the 'Humans and Environment' department since 2020.

His academic background includes Slavic studies, history, and Spanish studies completed at Tübingen and Moscow between 2006-2014. He earned his doctorate in 2019 with a thesis on Soviet environmental history titled 'Red River on Black Earth: The Kuban and the Agro-Meliorative Complex, 1929–1991'.

His research focuses on the cultural history of hunting in Eastern Europe, global fur trade interrelationships, environmental and technological history of Russia and the USSR, infrastructure history, and human-animal relationships. His current research examines hunting history in East Central Europe and resource use in country development.

He has taught courses in Slavic linguistics, Soviet economic history, global environmental history, human-animal studies, and hunting history at the University of Tübingen (2014-2020) and University of Leipzig (since 2021), plus served as a foreign language lecturer in Kyrgyzstan in 2015.

• DFG Network Hunting Stories
• DFG Network Russian Ecospheres
• German Society for East European Studies (DGO)
• European Society for Environmental History (ESEH)
• Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)

As Ombudsman Officer for Young Talent and Career Development, he supports early-career researchers while conducting his own research on how hunting practices reveal societal structures and power dynamics throughout Eastern European history.