PD Dr. Patricia Hertel
VITA
Biografie
Patricia Hertel is Privatdozentin at the University of Basel and associated researcher in the reasearch area “Circulations”. She is a historian for nineteenth and twentieth century Europe with a focus on transnational and cultural history. Her current research project deals with the transformation of professional travel in the age of aviation.
After a training as a publishing manager, she concluded a Magister degree in German Philology, History, and Portuguese Philology at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, as well as a training as a journalist. She earned a PhD degree at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) with a PhD thesis on the memory of the Islamic Middle Ages in nineteenth and twentieth century nationalism on the Iberian Peninsula (published in German and English). Thanks to a two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), she conducted research as a visiting scholar at King’s College London, the German Historical Institute London, the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and the Universitat de València. In 2023, she completed a habilitation degree at the University of Basel with her second book: Europe’s Favourite Dictatorships: Southern Authoritarianism, Tourism, and the “Free West.” From 2021 to 2025, she was a researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin, where she continues to be an associated researcher. In the academic year 2023/2024, she held the position of guest professor for Global History at the Freie Universität Berlin, replacing Professor Michael Goebel. Since 2010, she has held positions as a lecturer in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in academic writing at various universities (Basel, St. Gallen, Lucerne, and Fribourg/Switzerland).
Mutterinstitut:
University of Basel
FORSCHUNG
Forschungsthemen
• European history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• Travel and mobility
• Uses of infrastructures
• International relations
• Spatial concepts, “mental maps”
• Memory studies
• Dictatorial and authoritarian regimes
• Nationalism, notions of identity
Forschungsprojekt
Air Travel and the Transformation of the Modern Business World, 1920s–1990s
The possibility of travelling by air profoundly changed the way the world does business. Being able to cover longer distances in shorter times altered workflows in production and distribution for international corporations as well as the frequency, location, and length of meetings and business trips. In turn, air travel triggered new business models, and companies arose whose very existence was subject to this capability. Overall, the modern business world became increasingly dependent on air travel, with a social spectrum ranging from the sales representatives of medium-sized companies to a cosmopolitan elite eventually becoming what sociologist Richard Senett has described as “Davos Men”. With cultural historical methods, this project analyses how air travel, along with modern communication technologies, transformed international business relations. Air travel for professional purposes was, as the project argues, an important factor for creating and distinguishing a new type of middle and upper class in Europe and beyond. It triggered dynamics both of connections between groups of people as well as the marginalisation of others. Studying the practices and conventions around air travel in business relations serves as a perspective on how international and global mobility transformed business milieus in the twentieth century.