Dr. Benjamin W. Goossen – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr. Benjamin W. Goossen

Harvard University
History

External Junior Fellow
Balzan Fellow
February 2022 – July 2022

Last Update: 31.08.2022

Curriculum Vitae

Benjamin W. Goossen is a historian of modern Europe in the World. His current book project is a history of environmental science during the Cold War and decolonization, told through the lens of the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year. This manuscript has been recognized with dissertation awards from Harvard University and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Goossen’s scholarship has appeared in Antisemitism Studies, Contemporary European History, German Studies Review, the Journal of Global History, and elsewhere. He is also the author of Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era (Princeton 2017). Goossen has previously held fellowships with the European University Institute, the Fulbright Commission, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Most recently, he was a NASA Fellow in the History of Space Technology with the American Historical Association.

Selected Publications

“Europe’s Final Frontier: Astroculture and Planetary Power since 1945,” Contemporary European History, forthcoming.
“The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945-2000,” Antisemitism Studies 5, no. 2 (2021): 233-265.
“Terms of Racial Endearment: Nazi Categorization of Mennonites in Ideology and Practice, 1929-1945,” German Studies Review 44, no. 1 (2021): 27-46.
“A Benchmark for the Environment: Big Science and ‘Artificial’ Geophysics in the Global 1950s,” Journal of Global History 15, no. 1 (2020): 149-168.
Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). Paperback 2019.

FRIAS Project

The Year of the Earth (1957-1958): Cold War Science and the Making of Planetary Consciousness

This project examines how environmental science helped to concentrate wealth and power in the Global North following the retraction of European empires. It shows how the invention of Earth as an imagined set of physical systems was essential for new forms of empire and tactics of wealth accumulation. To tell this story, Goossen focuses on the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY), the first global study of our planet as a unified environment. The IGY involved tens of thousands of scientists and citizen volunteers from most countries. Its organizers (a remarkable team of rivals representing both sides of the Iron Curtain) publicly depicted their program as vital for global economic development. But acquiring comprehensive environmental data—including data related to “extreme” regions like the upper atmosphere, deep ocean, north and south poles, and outer space—allowed the Cold War superpowers and their allies to exercise worldwide military and commercial force while claiming to support decolonization across the Global South.