This talk will discuss the biographical genre, often dismissed in today's humanities. Can it help us understand those processes that contributed to constituting a more modern—and more global—world two hundred years ago?

Andreas W. Daum is a professor of history at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research interest reach from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century. Daum focuses on transatlantic relations in this era, the history of knowledge and popular science, and the Cold War. He is currently working on a biographical study on Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). Andreas Daum is the author of Kennedy in Berlin (German 2003; English, with Cambridge University Press, 2008), a micro-history of the Cold War with an emphasis on the role of emotions as well as a monograph on popular science in the nineteenth century (1998, 2nd edition 2002). He has co-edited, with Cambridge University Press, a volume on the Vietnam War in international and comparative perspectives as well as a volume on Berlin and Washington, DC as capital cities in a comparative perspective.