Heidi is Assistant Professor of International History in the History Department of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is also Visiting Fellow at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University. She is an affiliate of the Science and Technology Studies Graduate Program and the Science Languages Initiative at UBC as well as the Minda da Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She was a visiting fellow at the ‘Reluctant Internationalists’ project in 2016, as well as at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam. Besides academic publications, Heidi’s work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, Wired, Der Tagesspiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Nieman Report. Her dissertation received the Herman E. Krooss Prize for best dissertation in business history.
Heidi’s research addresses three major facets of internationalism: communications, international organisations, and health. Her work on communications examines the infrastructures and content of international media. She is currently completing her first book on the history of how German elites sought to control world communications in the first half of the twentieth century. Second, she seeks to provide resources for researching and teaching the history of international organisations. She manages the United Nations History Project website, one of the leading academic websites on the history of international organisations. Her new project explores the history of health communications. While the history of international medicine has focused on treatment, this project examines how health communications and information became just as important for trying to stop the flow of disease across borders.