معرفی
Professor Monika Dommann holds a Chair at the History Department of the University of Zurich, where she leads research on the development and impact of technology, media, infrastructures, and knowledge in diverse social, cultural, and political contexts from the 19th to the 21st century, with particular focus on interrelationships between Europe, North America, and the Caribbean.
Her research interests span cultural and media history, economic history, the history of knowledge and science, and digital history. She examines how technological systems shape social relations and how knowledge circulates through media infrastructures, with recent work focusing on logistics history, copyright, and the material dimensions of economic practices. Her research reveals how seemingly neutral technical systems carry political dimensions and historical contingencies.
Analysis of her recent publications shows a consistent trajectory examining the relationship between material infrastructures and knowledge systems. Her work moves from early studies on X-ray technology to copyright history, then to economic observation systems, and most recently to logistics and supply chain history. A recurring theme is how standardization processes create invisible frameworks that govern social and economic life.
Professor Dommann actively supervises numerous BA and MA students, with dozens of theses completed under her guidance covering diverse historical topics from telephone surveillance in Switzerland to the squatting movement in 1980s Zurich. Her research group regularly offers courses on historical methods and theories alongside specialized topics in media and economic history.
Her work is organized through collaborative research projects with international partners, often resulting in edited volumes that bring together scholars from multiple disciplines. Current projects focus on data centers, new economy formations, and material flows in global contexts.
