Mario Wimmer teaches Modern European History. He studied history, sociology, psychology, and science studies, and received his PhD in Modern History from the University of Bielefeld in 2010. His research focuses on three main areas: the cultural and institutional history of knowledge, the critical history of rationality, and the history of an historical sense. Other research interests include the rhetoric of modern humanities and social sciences, the history of media, film, and popular culture, as well as Weimar culture, and the history and memory of National Socialism. He has also worked as a curator and remains interested in curatorial work and museum studies.

Mario’s first book, Archival Bodies. An History of Historical Imagination, Konstanz University Press, 2012 (re-edition 2013, in German), combines approaches from the history of science, historiography, and cultural history in a study that explores modern archives as a heterotopic space where the administration of words and things intersects with the embodiment of historical imagination. His book tells the story of an encounter between an archivist obsessed with the classification of files and the organization of archival language and a collector and historian who not only stole thousands of archival documents, but later confessed to have had sex with them. Archival bodies analyzes how this case of necrophilic fetishism relates to the normal science of archivists and historians and shows how the archivist’s notion of archival bodies can be read as a material metaphor for the shape of historical time.

His current work involves a broad engagement with material and intellectual history of practices of time in ethnography, history, folklore, psychoanalysis, and the study of myth. He continues to work at the intersection of a cultural and institutional history of knowledge, history of media and popular culture, and the history of an historical sense.   He has been a visiting assistant Professor at ECNU Shanghai, China, and taught in the program on the history of knowledge at ETH Zürich.

In Spring 2014 he teaches an upper division undergraduate course on the "Matter of Archives;" He also offer courses on "The Unconscious in Modern Culture, the "History of Knowledge," the "History of Media Technology," or "The History of Everyday Life". Mario is affiliated with the Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, and the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies.

Mario Wimmer's areas of research are the cultural and institutional history of historical knowledge; the history and theory of archives; the history of intellectual practices in the humanities and social science; as well as the relationship between history and psychoanalysis.