Hansjakob ZiemerView profile
Researcher
Hansjakob Ziemer is a Senior Research Scholar and Head of Research Communication and Management at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, part of the Max Planck Society. He has been affiliated with the institute from 2011 to 2025, leading the Research Communication and Management team while conducting significant scholarly research in cultural and knowledge history. Dr. Ziemer earned his doctorate in Modern History in 2007 from Humboldt University. Prior to joining MPIWG, he was a Research Scholar at Dubnow-Institute for Jewish Culture and Life at the University of Leipzig. His academic journey reflects a deep engagement with German and Central European cultural history, particularly focusing on the intersections of music, journalism, and knowledge formation. Ziemer's research explores how cultural, spatial, and knowledge practices constructed imagined communities and influenced boundary-drawing between disciplines and social groups in the 19th and 20th centuries. His work centers on practices such as musical listening and journalistic writing within societal venues like concert halls and feuilletons. He investigates two main strands: cultural histories of musical listening and knowledge histories of journalistic practices as forms of communication and community-building. His scholarly output reveals consistent engagement with the history of community formation in Germany and Central Europe, examining how music listening in communal venues constructed modern urban German culture, the institutionalization of disciplines like musicology and sociology, and the relationship between journalism and academic disciplinary boundaries. His research demonstrates how journalistic knowledge practices contributed to social knowledge formation before being incorporated into formal academic disciplines. Monograph: "Die Moderne hören" (2008) on music listening in concert halls Co-edited "Handbuch Sound" (2018) Co-edited "Oxford Handbook on the History of Music Listening" (2019) Edited "Journalists and Knowledge Practices" (2023) Current monograph: "Knowing to Claim, Claiming to Know: Journalists and Epistemic communities in 20th century Europe" Co-directing DFG-funded project on "Music Seeing and Music Listening" (2025-28) Ziemer has led several significant collaborative projects, including working groups on sound and language, and journalistic knowledge practices sponsored by the German Historical Institute and MPIWG. His work bridges disciplinary boundaries, connecting musicology, journalism studies, cultural anthropology, and the history of knowledge.










