Principal Investigator

Who I am

I write the concluding synthetic monograph for the MaMoGH project: a world history of food production in the modern era. And yes, just writing that makes one feel like an impostor. Our planet has a dazzling diversity of food items and an even more dazzling array of organic production regimes, but they are part of a global endeavor: making monoculture work against all odds. That is the story that I will analyze in my big book.

A world history obviously draws on the existing academic literature, and I am greatly indebted to legions of scholars, including a lot of historians. I also talk extensively with members of my team: all their projects double as proving grounds for my working arguments. But I have found it dubious to look at the topic solely through the eyes of other academics, and that is why have embarked on an array of small research projects in various monocultures around the globe. Some of these projects have resulted in journal articles on Florida’s citrus industry  and hog cholera in Germany (the latter is also an essay on post-pandemic history writing). Other projects will only become visible in the concluding book. I have found it tremendously rewarding to look at source material in all their complexity and ambiguity: beyond individual insights, the exercise has taught me intellectual humility, which should be one of the cardinal virtues for anyone doing world history.

For all their diversity, I have stuck to one principle in selecting my research topics: I have kept my distance from the projects of other team members. The world of monoculture is wide and diverse, and there is no point in duplicating other people’s work. And every researcher in my team is entitled to some elbow room.

Lehrstuhl für Technik- und Umweltgeschichte
Universitätsstraße 150
Gebäude GA 4/54, Fachnr. 182
44780 Bochum

Email: frank.uekoetter@rub.de

I am professor for the history of technology and environmental history at Ruhr University Bochum and principal investigator of the MaMoGH project. For more on my academic biography, please click here. 

How I became interested in monocultures

My work on the history of agriculture began in 2003 when I received funding for a post-doc project on the history of agricultural knowledge in Germany. This eventually led to my habilitation thesis that was published in 2010: a reinterpretation of German agricultural history from a history of knowledge perspective.  While working on this monograph, I came to realize that this was just the German version of a history that played out in somewhat similar fashion elsewhere on this planet. I worked on some other topics since 2009, though agricultural issues featured prominently in “The Vortex”, my environmental history of the modern world. I wrote the grant proposal for MaMoGH in 2021.

What I do