Mareike Vennen is a cultural studies scholar and has been working at the Technische Universität Berlin in the joint project “Museums and Society – Mapping the Social” since 2020. She studied cultural studies, literary studies, and theater studies in Berlin and Paris and received her PhD from the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in 2016 with a thesis on the history of the culture and knowledge of the aquarium in the nineteenth century. In 2018, her thesis received the Volkswagen Foundation’s Opus Primum Prize for best publication by an emerging scholar. She went on to work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technische Universität Berlin in the BMBF project “Dinosaurs in Berlin: Brachiosaurus brancai as an Icon of Politics, Science and Popular Culture” and in the research project “Animals as Objects: Zoological Gardens and Natural History Museums in Berlin, 1810 to 2020” at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
She researches the material and visual cultures, collecting practices, and logistics of natural history, and examines the politics and ecologies of urban spaces, focusing on Berlin. In her previous projects, she focused on the cultures of amateur science, the colonial history of natural history collections, and the history of the relationships between zoos and museums. Her work is situated at the intersection between perspectives on the history of knowledge, the environment, and the city, and she is very interested in the interdisciplinary exchange that takes place between universities, museums, and the arts, as well as in new communication formats for science and teaching. This includes her work at the Berlin Institute for Artistic Research Berlin, where she managed projects on the threshold between art and science, and her work on formats for inquiry-based teaching, like the exhibition “Animal Topographies: Audio Stories about Animals in Berlin” and forms of online publishing like the website animalsasobjects.org.
Publications
Mareike Vennen, Das Aquarium: Praktiken, Techniken und Medien der Wissensproduktion, 1840–1910 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018).
Mareike Vennen, Ina Heumann, Holger Stoecker, and Marco Tamborini, Dinosaurierfragmente: Zur Geschichte der Tendaguru-Expedition und ihrer Objekte, 1906–2017 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018).
Mareike Vennen, “Der Grüne Komplex: Episoden zur Naturgeschichte der Stadt,” Kursbuch 197 (2019), 131–146, Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/user-52....
Mareike Vennen, “Träger-Arbeiten: Die Zirkulation kolonialer Dinge und Bilder der Tendaguru-Expedition (1909-1913),” in Der Träger: Zu einer ‘tragenden’ Figur der Kolonialgeschichte, ed. by Sonja Malzner and Anne D. Peiter (Bielefeld: transcript, 2019), 157–180.
Mareike Vennen, “Bis es kippt: Versuchsanordnungen im Aquarium zwischen Ästhetik und Ökologie,” in Ökologie und die Künste, ed. by Erika Fischer-Lichte and Daniela Hahn (Paderborn: Fink, 2015), 181–197.