Meet Carl

Carl Deußen majored in Culture and History and graduated from UCF in 2017. After his LAS studies, Carl finished a Master program in Museum Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Currently, he is holding a joint PhD research position at the University of Amsterdam and the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum Köln.

“When I started LAS, working in a museum had not been my plan at all – I was not even a keen museumgoer. This only began to change during my year abroad in Ecuador, where I visited local museums dealing with the country’s complex and often violent history. These museums brought up many questions I had no answer to: Who is telling what kind of story in these spaces, and what is left out? What was my own position there, as a White European man? These issues accompanied me to my bachelor thesis, which I wrote on the Amazonian rubber boom, and they eventually made me choose Museum Studies in Amsterdam as my master.

At that point, the controversy over the Humboldt Forum in Berlin was just starting to heat up, but in Amsterdam, the debate about the importance of representing the colonial past was already in full swing. I quickly noticed that the questions I had been asking myself were part of this debate and I began to focus on the central arena for this discussion, the ethnographic museum. What I had learned during my LAS Bachelor was much better suited to this task than I had anticipated. The museum turned out to be a decidedly interdisciplinary space and my prior education helped me to stay on top of things.

For my master thesis, I ended up in my hometown Cologne, where the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum was so kind to open its archive to my research on ethnographic collecting and imperial masculinity. This work allowed to combine two of my interests I had developed in Freiburg – gender and colonialism – and to apply them to the case of Wilhelm Joest, the museum’s founding collector. The research worked out, and after I had finished my thesis, the museum offered me a position to continue my work. My supervisor in Amsterdam also urged me to take this opportunity and, in the end, I took the decision to start a joint PhD at the museum and the University of Amsterdam. While funding was initially limited to one year, I was lucky enough to secure additional funds from the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung to continue my work for three more years.

This also gave me the opportunity to return to UCF. Together with Annika Roes, a fellow alumna of LAS, we taught a course on “(Post-)Colonial Histories at the Museum”, in which students not only learned about the challenges of representing colonialism, but also got to curate a small part of the upcoming exhibition on Freiburg’s role in Imperial Germany. Returning to the UCF as a lecturer – if only digitally – has been a wonderful experience for me, and I am looking forward to contributing further to this place where I first came into contact with many of the ideas that still continue to define my work and thinking.”