Derek Hattemer
Visiting Fellow
GHI Pacific Office Berkeley
Institute of European Studies | University of California, Berkeley | 202 Philosophy Hall | Berkeley, CA 94720-2316
Phone
Biographical Summary
Derek Hattemer joined the GHI Pacific Office as Tandem Fellow in August 2026. He is a financial historian, specializing in the history of insurance in a global comparative perspective. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and the University of Basel in April 2026. His dissertation, Underwriting Autarky: Life Insurance for the Masses in Interwar Italy and Germany, traces how mass life insurance developed alongside modern social welfare under fascism. In his current project – Insuring Global Markets: Insurance Privatization in the Age of Globalization, 1980-2008 – he reconstructs the transnational spread of a new paradigm of state-market relations in insurance from developmentalism to financialization. Before joining the GHI, Derek taught courses in social and economic history at Humboldt University of Berlin.
Main Areas of Interest
- 20th-Century History of Europe
- Global and Transnational History
- History of Risk and Insurance
- History of Fascism
- History of Social Welfare
- Comparative Historical Sociology