Dr Michael Sauter

Research Interests

Serial murder, psychology, and modernity in Weimar Germany.

Libraries in colonial Latin America and the global spatial imagination.

Cartography, religion, and madness in Renaissance visual culture.

Euclidean geometry in European culture between 1350 and 1850.

Religion, cartography, and madness in Renaissance culture.

Intellectual history, the history of science, race and gender, the history of visual culture, digital humanities.

Publications

Selected publications (see ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5930-0380 for full listing)

Books

European Thought and Culture, 1350-1992: Burdens of Knowing (London and New York: Routledge, 2021)

The Spatial Reformation: Euclid Between Man, Cosmos and God (Philadelphia, Penn.: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Visions of the Enlightenment: The Edict on Religion of 1788 and Political Reaction in Prussia, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 177 (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2009).

Book Manuscript Under Review

The Cartographic Fool: Maps, Religion, and Visual Culture in Renaissance Europe

Under review at Walter DeGruyter in Berlin, this study examines cartography, printmaking, and visual culture in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands in the sixteenth century.

Publications in Refereed Journals

“Becoming a Bourgeois Killer: Peter Kürten, the Vampire of Düsseldorf,” German History (forthcoming).

“The Starry Heavens: Outer Space and the Transformation of Anthropology in the Early Modern Period,” Historia y Grafía (November, 2016).

“The Enlightenment on Trial: State Service and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Germany’s Public Sphere,” Modern Intellectual History (August, 2008).

“Clock Watchers and Stargazers: Time Discipline in Early-Modern Berlin,” American Historical Review (June, 2007).

“Preaching, a Ponytail, and an Enthusiast: Rethinking the Public Sphere’s Subversiveness in Eighteenth-Century Prussia,” Central European History (December, 2004).

Co-authored, “Paris and the Rise of Clinical Medicine during the French Revolution and Under Napoleon,” Osiris (July, 2003).

Co-authored, “Why did Humphry Davy Not Explore the Pain-Alleviating Properties of Nitrous Oxide?” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (April, 2002).

Refereed Book Chapters and other Publications

“Simmel’s Berlin and Money as Social Consensus,” in Jason Coy, Benjamin Marschke and Jared Poley, eds., Money in the German States (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017).

“For the Love of Geometry: The Rise of Euclidism in the Early Modern World, 1450-1850,” in Jason Coy, Benjamin Marschke, Jared Poley, and Claudia Verhoeven, eds., Kinship and Community Society and Culture in European History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015).

“The First Globalization: Celestial and Terrestrial Globes in the Early Modern Period” in Gudrun Wolfschmidt, ed., Der Himmel über Tübingen: Barocksternwarten-Landesvermessung-Hochenergieastrophysik (Hamburg: tredition, 2014).

“Leonhard Euler,” in Manfred Kuehn and Heiner Klemme, eds., Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers (Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2010).

“Visions of the Enlightenment: Johann Christoph Woellner and Prussia’s Edict on Religion of 1788,” in John Christian Laursen, et. al., Monarchists and Monarchisms in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

“The Enlightenment on Trial: Religion, Resistance, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century Prussia,” (in Spanish) Istor (January, 2004).

“Reinhart Koselleck” in Alan C. Kors, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

“Freemasonry” in Derek Jones, ed., Censorship: A World Encyclopedia (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001).

Invited Talks

“Critiques Unspoken: Religion, Visual Culture and the Global Imagination in Renaissance Europe,” 12th Congress on Economic History, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, November 23, 2021.

“God and the Cartographic Fool: Belgian Printmaking in the Sixteenth Century,” Instituto de Estudos Avançados da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, June 24, 2019.

“From Space to Place: Books, Images, and Material Culture in the Rise of a Global Imagination,” Universidade de São Paulo, Conjunto Didático de História e Geografia da Faculdade de Filosofia Letras e Ciências Sociais da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, May 20, 2019

**Keynote Address**“The Spatial Reformation,” Gulf University of Science and Technology, Unity between East and West Conference, Kuwait City, Kuwait, February 9, 2019.

**Keynote Address**”“Public Clocks and Pocketwatches: The Rise of Time Discipline in Eighteenth-century Europe,” 26º Simpósio Internacional de Iniciação Científica e Tecnológica, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, November 23, 2018.

“Relocating “Global” Knowledge: Colonial Latin American Libraries and the European Spatial Imagination,” University of California, Los Angeles, Conference on Historical Epistemology, Los Angeles, CA, May 18, 2018.

“Eden’s End: Geography and the Humanization of Space, 1550-1650,” McGill University and The Newberry Library, The Politics of Conversion IV, Chicago, IL, September 15, 2017.

“Deracinating the Divine: Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I Between Theology and the Rise of Geometry,” McGill University and CIDE, The Politics of Conversion III, Mexico City, March 9, 2017.

“Alexander von Humboldt,” CIDE, Unveiling the Portrait of Humboldt and the Vintage Map of Mexico, Mexico City, February 23, 2017.

**Keynote Address**“The Spatial Reformation: Euclidean Geometry and the Transformation of Western Thought, 1350 – 1850,” Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM)-Iztapalapa, Colloquium on Critical Engagement with the History of Europe, January 29, 2015.

“The First Globalization: Terrestrial and Celestial Globes in the Early Modern Period,” University of Tübingen Conference for the History of Astronomy, Tübingen, Germany, September 22, 2013.

“Strangers to the World: Astronomy and the Rise of Early-Modern Anthropology,” Institute for Advanced Study, Göttingen, Germany, July 3, 2013.

“Clockwatchers and Stargazers in the 18th Century,” Hamburg Observatory, Hamburg, Germany, January 16, 2013.

“Making Human Space: Globes and the Spatial Imagination, 1450-1600,” Duke University, FNI Conference: Visual Acuity and the Arts of Communication in Early Modern Germany, Durham, NC, March 30, 2012.

“Germans in Space: Astronomy and Anthropologie in the Eighteenth Century,” Clark Library, Spaces of the Self in Early Modern Culture Part 2 – Sites of Exteriority, Los Angeles, CA, November 30, 2007.

“Germans in Space: Astronomy and Anthropologie in the Eighteenth Century,” University of Indiana at Bloomington, Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Workshop, Bloomington, IA, August 24, 2007.

“Clockwatchers and Stargazers: The 'Public' Origins of Time Discipline in Eighteenth-Century Berlin,” Duke University, FNI Conference: Orthodoxies and Diversities, Durham, NC, April 8, 2005.

“Lost in Space: Astronomy and the Boundaries of the German Mind, 1686-1791,” University of South Florida, The Nineteenth Annual DeBartolo Conference, Tampa, FL, February 18, 2005.

**Keynote Address**“Europe as Export Product: Germany and the Problem of Europe since AD 1000,” Annual Meeting of German Teachers in Mexico, Mexico City, May 14, 2004.

**Keynote Address**“Preachers, Ponytails, and Enthusiasm: On the Nature of Subversiveness in Eighteenth-Century Prussia,” National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Homage to Immanuel Kant: Reason-Liberty-Right, Two Centuries Since His Death, February 12, 2004.