Biographical Summary

Claudia Roesch is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington since 2018 and spokesperson for the GHI History of Knowledge research focus since 2019. Her research interests include the history of gender, family, migration, and knowledge in a transatlantic perspective. She studied Contemporary History, English and American Studies at Humboldt University Berlin and received her PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Münster in 2014 with a dissertation of Mexican immigrant families in the 20th century United States. Since then, she has received a postdoctoral research grant by the Gerda Henkel Foundation for archival research on the project “Between Public Decisions and Private Choice: Reproductive Debates in the 20th Century United States.” From 2015 to 2017, she was a researcher in the University of Münster’s Collaborative Research Center “Cultures of Decision-Making”. Her publications include Macho Men and Modern Women: Mexican Immigration, Social Experts and Changing Family Values in the 20th Century United States (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Oldenbourg 2015), “Pro Familia and the Reform of Abortion Laws in West Germany, 1967-1983”, in: Journal of Modern European History 17. Jg., 2019, H. 3, S. 297-311; "A Contested Pill. Transnational Controversies over Medical Abortion in Germany, France, and the United States", in: Journal of Contemporary History (2022 forthcoming). Her second book Wunschkinder: Eine transnationale Geschichte der Familienplanung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Wanted Children. A Transnational History of Family Planning in West Germany) was published in November 2021 with Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Her new research project investigates the transatlantic circulation of engineering and birth control knowledge in the 19th century.