Cornel Zwierlein is currently teaching early modern history and doing research on a Heisenberg-Stelle at the Freie Universität Berlin, Friedrich-Meinecke Institut. He had been w1-prof. from 2008 to 2017 at Bochum (additional Habilitations-Lehrbefugnis 2011, continuing), has taught from 2001 to 2008 early modern history at LMU Munich where he earned his PhD in 2003 from the LMU and the CESR Tours. After several Fellowships and research stays abroad (Harvard Hist. Dep., Cambridge CRASSH), he collaborates as his nominator with the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundationʼs Anneliese-Maier-Award winner Professor Alan Mikhail (Yale University). Monographs: Discorso and Lex Dei. Die Entstehung neuer Denkrahmen im 16. Jahrhundert und die Wahrnehmung der französischen Religionskriege in Italien und Deutschland (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: 2006); The Political Thought of the French League and Rome, 1585-1589. De justa populi gallici ab Henrico tertio defectione and De justa Henrici tertii abdicatione (Jean Boucher, 1589) (Droz: 2016); Imperial Unknowns. The French and the British in the Mediterranean, 1650-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2016); Politische Theorie und Herrschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit (utb 5439, 2020); Prometheus Tamed. Fire, Security and Modernities, 1400 to 1900 (Brill: 2021, revised and enlarged English version of the Habilitation thesis).

The present case studies on early modern travelers, dispersed often by unintended consequences of war, curiosity, economic or political reasons in the Mediterranean, the Americas and Japan, ask for what ¿power(s)¿ and agency they still had, perhaps counterintuitively, abroad.