Leibniz Chair

Professor Jenny Mander is Leibniz Chair at the German Maritime Museum – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History (DSM) and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement an der University of Cambridge (UK). Her research focuses on the early modern period and the way in which the Enlightenment has been used (and misused) as a historiographical reference point in late modern debates. Mander is intensively engaged with the question of how global exchange and transnational movements shape our common history in Europe and beyond. In doing so, she expands the DSM's expertise beyond transatlantic migration history to a global maritime perspective, thereby contributing significantly to raising the institute's profile. The collaboration with Jenny Mander involves establishing a strategic, long-term partnership between the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement and the DSM.

Professor William O’Reilly has rendered outstanding services to the DSM and, on the basis of this outstanding scientific connection and with the approval of the Presidium of the Leibniz Association, has been appointed to an honorary Leibniz Chair from 2018 to 2023.

O'Reilly studied history at the National University of Ireland, the University of Hamburg and the University of Oxford. He received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his master's degree and doctorate in early modern European and Atlantic history at the University of Oxford. This was followed by visiting professorships at Harvard University, Paris I-Sorbonne, Bielefeld University, Graz University and Christian Albrecht University in Kiel, among others. O'Reilly is currently Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Arts. Since 2017, he has been a Permanent Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study in Budapest. He was awarded the Leibniz Chair for History at the DSM in 2018.

His primary research and publication interests include: history of migration and colonialism, early modern European and maritime history, history of early modern Germany and Central Europe, history of ideas.