Office Hours during the summer semester 2026
During the semester, my office hours are held by appointment on Tuesdays from 2 to 3 p.m. in my office GA 4/53. Zoom meetings are available by arrangement.

Lukas Held is a historian of contemporary history and historian of science; his research lies at the intersection between the history of science, the history of ideas and the history of the environment. He has worked on the history of the modern human sciences, in particular the history of psychological, economic and anthropological thought since the late 19th century. He is currently focusing on the history of the commons as a new field of study and its impact on the transformation of the public spirit since the 1960s. His first monograph was published by Wallstein Verlag in 2024 and is entitled Angst und Antrieb. Verwissenschaftlichung des Willens und Politik der Selbststeuerung in Deutschland und den USA, 1874-1974 (open access).

Carreer path

• 8.2024 - : Postdoc at Bochum's chair for the history of technology and environmental history
• 8.2023 - 7.2024: Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture (gta), Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich
• 1. - 2.2023 Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.
• 8.2016 - 2.2017: Visiting PhD student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. with Jamie Cohen-Cole
• 7.2013 - 12.2021: Doctoral studies at UZH, funded by the Forschungskredit of the University of Zurich and the Swiss National Science Foundation (defense: 3. 2022)
• 2012 - 2013: Research Assistant to Prof. Dr. Veronika Lipphardt at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
• 2005 - 2011: Studies in Modern and Contemporary History and Literature at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, University of Leicester

Postdoc Project

Utopian Realism: Collective Worldmaking in an Age of Fracture, 1970–2020

The project investigates the emergence of the contemporary commons paradigm as a specific form of utopian thought in the „age of fragmentation“. Here, visions of sustainable and cooperative forms of living are not merely imagined in the abstract but are practically tested through experimental, infrastructurally embedded practices. At its core, the project asks which visions of the future (including competing ones) are articulated within commons research and the commons movement associated with it, and which strategies for social transformation emerge from them.

Starting from two scholarly networks in Germany and the United States, the project reconstructs how, since the 1970s, the question of what commons are and how they should be governed gave rise to a transdisciplinary field of research encompassing both the social and natural sciences, while also fostering an international network of scholars, laboratories, and experimental sites. The project analyses how, since the 2000s, the findings of this research have been taken up by commons activists and further developed into a relational understanding of social reality that is rendered politically effective through concrete practices and infrastructures of sharing.

By focusing on the interconnections between science, politics, and activism, the project pursues two objectives. First, it traces the emergence of a planetarily oriented conception of the common good, examining both its distinctions from and its entanglements with changing conceptions of the state and the market. Second, it reconstructs the emergence of the homo cooperativus by examining how different forms of cooperative behavior have been brought together – through experimental laboratory research, empirical field studies, and projects within the commons movement – to produce a new understanding of human nature.

The project argues that these developments represent a distinctive transformation of the utopian. Comprehensive blueprints for society have given way to experimental practices in which new forms of cooperative living are tested at the local level. Social change is no longer conceived as the result of revolutionary rupture but rather as the effect of the strategic expansion of specific infrastructures of sharing and cooperation that challenge (and potentially displace) existing political and economic regimes of appropriation and exclusion.

The project offers a critical reflection on these developments by uncovering their ideological roots, identifying their sometimes contradictory trajectories, and examining their unintended consequences. 

Teaching

Winter 2026/27 

Übung: Donna Haraway für Historiker*innen: Wissen, Cyborgs, Weltverhältnisse

Seminar: Den Staat denken, Ordnung materialisieren. Politische Ideen und Infrastruktur von Thomas Hobbes bis Michel Foucault

Summer 2026

Übung: Die Geschichte der Gegenwart schreiben

Seminar: Wissen für alle? Geschichte der „Open Access“-Bewegung zwischen Demokratie und Kapitalismus

Winter 2025/26

Übung: Einführung in die Science and Technology Studies

Seminar: Jenseits von Markt und Staat: Neue Formen des Politischen im „Zeitalter der Fragmentierung“ (1980-2010)

Summer 2025

Seminar: Living Laboratories. Geschichte und Politik partizipativer Wissensproduktion im Feld

Winter 2024/25

Seminar: Natur und Gemeinschaft im langen 20. Jahrhundert

Übung: Der Planet. Geschichte einer neuen politischen Kategorie

Publications (*peer-reviewed)

Book

Held, Lukas: Angst und Antrieb. Verwissenschaftlichung des Willens und Politik der Selbststeuerung in Deutschland und den USA, 1874-1974, Göttingen 2024 (Wallstein Verlag, Konstanz University Press), Link

Interviews

Im Fokus: Geschichte der Willenskraft. Psychologie Heute 4/2026 (13.3.2026), Link

Articels

Held, Lukas: Historische Orientierung in Zeiten der Unordnung. Überlegungen zu einem neuen Meta-Narrativ der Zeitgeschichte, Merkur, Nr. 924, Jg. 80, Mai 2026, S. 5-21, Link

Held, Lukas: Social Intervention in Curacao. Using Behavioral Science Technologies for Social and Economic Development, 1969-1971, Science in Context (2025), Link

Held, Lukas: Motivationspsychologen als politische Aktivisten: Zur Politik der Selbststeuerung in den USA der langen 1960er Jahre, in: NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin, 30 (2022) 473-499, Link

Held, Lukas/Wulz, Monika/Germann, Pascal: Einleitung: Scientific Political Activism. Zur politischen Geschichte wissenschaftlichen Wissens, in: NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin, 30 (2022) 435-444, Link

Book chapters

Held, Lukas (2018), Achievement and the Meaning of Effort: the Fixation with Goals and How the Concept of Motivation Replaced the Human Will, in: Reh, Sabine, Ricken, Norbert (Hrsg.), Leistung als Paradigma. Zur Entstehung und Transformation eines pädagogischen Konzepts, Springer: Wiesbaden, 271-284 Link

Held, Lukas (2017), Waste or Motivation? The Productivity Discourse Between Past and Future in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, in: Peter-Paul Bänziger/Mischa Suter (Hrsg.): Histories of Productivity. Genealogical Perspectives on the Body and Modern Economy, Routledge, 2017: New York, 174 - 189, Link

Reviews

Held, Lukas (2022), Rezension: Berman, Elizabeth Popp: Thinking like an Economist. How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy, Princeton 2022, in: H-Soz-Kult, (25.9.2022) Link

Held, Lukas (2016), Rezension: Bradford, Gwen: Achievement, 212 S., Oxford UP, Oxford u. a. 2015, in: Neue Politische Literatur, 61 (1), 110 - 111

Held, Lukas (2014): Rezension: Jaeggi, Rahel: Kritik von Lebensformen, Berlin 2014 , in: H-Soz-Kult Link

Organized conference panels and workshops

6/2021 History of Science Suisse - Connecting Switzerland based early career scholars in the History of Science, ETH Zürich, 7.6.2021 (zusammen mit Niki Rhyner und Stephan Graf), Link

5/2019 Workshop: Scientific Political Activism. Zur politischen Geschichte wissenschaftlichen Wissens, Zentrum Geschichte des Wissens, ETH & Universität Zürich, 2.-3. Mai 2019 (zusammen mit Monika Wulz), Bericht auf H-Soz-Kult

7/2017 Konferenz-Panel: Technological Reinvention of the Mind: Emancipatory Promises, Colonizing Assumptions, and 'the Human' in Educational Technologies of the long 1960s, International Standing Conference for the History of Education, Argentinien, Buenos Aires, 18.07.2017 (zusammen mit Viktoria Boretska und Barbara Emma Hof), PDF

Talks

07/2026 Jenseits der repräsentativen Demokratie? Zur Entstehung einer politischen Rationalität des Teilen (Vortrag), Forschungskolloquium der Professuren für Technik- und Umweltgeschichte und für Zeitgeschichte (Prof. Dr. Constantin Goschler, PD Dr. Caroline Rothauge), Ruhr-Universität Bochum (15.7.2026)

02/2026 Utopischer Realismus. Eine politische Wissensgeschichte kollektiver Weltgestaltung, 1970-2020 (Vortrag), Forschungskolloquium des Kulturwissenschaftlichen Instituts Essen (4.2.2026), Link

01/2026 Nach der liberalen Demokratie? Polyzentrismus, Neues Mittelalter und die Rolle der Geschichtsschreibung im Wandel des Politischen (Vorlesung), Ringvorlesung „Disorder“, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (20.01.2026), Link

10/2025 Commoning als Antwort auf die Krise der Demokratie? Überlegungen zur Historisierung des Commons-Paradigmas (Vortrag), Forschungskolloquium der Professuren Stefan Berger & Frank Uekötter, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (20.10.2025)

06/2025 Das Commons-Paradigma im Zeitalter der Fragmentierung. Einordnende Überlegungen aus zeitgeschichtlicher Perspektive (Vortrag), Architecture Symposium 2025: Spatial Commons between Conviviality & Planetarism, Berner Fachhochschule (Biel, 20.6.2025), Link

11/2024 Referat zum Postdoc-Projekt in der Forschungsgruppe „The Making of Monoculture“, University College London (London, 1.11.2024)

12/2023 Werkstattgespräche des Master of Advanced Studies in „Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur", 14.-15.12.2023 an der ETH Zürich – Gastkommentare zu den Forschungsplänen von drei Masterand:innen, Link

11/2023 „The Past as Moral Reservoir and Filter. How ‚commons' thinking creates and (mis-)uses history", Swiss Conference for Early-Career Historians: Reflections on the Past, Perspectives for the Future: The Role of Historians in Times of Societal Changes, Basel, 9-10 November 2023, Link

1/2023 Vorstellung des Habilitationsprojekts am German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. (19.01.2023)

1/2023 Using Behavioral Science Technologies for Social and Economic Development, 1969-1971 (Vortrag & Paper), Author's Workshop "Historicizing Interventionist Social Knowledge, 1950s–2000s", Universität Luzern, 26.-28.1.2023

5/2022 Governing a Fractured World. A History of the Commons-Paradigm and the Transformation of the Public Spirit, 1960s-2000s, History of Science Suisse Meeting, University Fribourg, 20.5.2022, Link

6/2021 Panel Chair und Kommentar zu drei Vorträgen, History of Science Suisse Meeting, ETH Zürich, 7.6.2021

3/2020 Creating the Will. Modern Origins of Will Psychology, the Politics of Motivation during the Cold War, and the Making of Capitalist Democrats, 1870-1975 (Vortrag), History of Science Suisse Meeting, 6.3.2020, EPF Lausanne, Link

5/2019 Politik der Selbststeuerung: Strukturelle Ungleichheit als psychologisches Problem (Vortrag), Scientific Political Activism. Zur politischen Geschichte wissenschaftlichen Wissens, Zentrum Geschichte des Wissens, ETH & Universität Zürich, 2.-3. Mai 2019

9/2018 Primary rejection and the liveable life: Foucault's late concept of free will in his reading of the Iranian Revolution and revolutionary voices from Ukraine (Vortrag), ‚Primary Rejections' A Comparative Workshop On the Refusing Personality in German and European Literature, History, and Culture, University of Cambridge, UK, 28.-29.9.2018, Link

7/2017 Motivation Psychology and its Impact on Education (Vortrag), International Standing Conference for the History of Education, Argentinien, Buenos Aires, 18.07.2017

2/2017 From Will to Motivation. Concepts of achievement and concpets of Effort in historical perspective (Vortrag), Kolloquium von Prof. Dr. Jamie Cohen-Cole, George Washington University, Washington D.C., 06.02.2017

8/2016 The construction of achievement and the emergence of motivation psychology in West Germany (Vortrag), Konferenz: »Merit / Achievement as a Paradigm: Discourse and Practices in a Historical Perspective«, Chicago, 16.08.2016

8/2015 Leistung zwischen Kritik und Lob: Die Leistungsdebatte der 1970er Jahre als Selbstverständigungsprozess am Ende der Hochmoderne (Vortrag), Konferenz: „Wertewandel in Wirtschaft und Arbeitswelt? Arbeit, Leistung und Führung in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland", Mainz, 26.08.2015

6/2014 Der Körper als Ressource. Produktivitätsdiskurse zwischen Vergangenheits- und Zukunftsorientierung (Vortrag), Konferenz: Produktive Körper. Aktuelle Forschungen zur Körpergeschichte des Ökonomischen, Basel, 05.06.2014 - 07.06.2014