PD Dr. Eva Maria Gajek
Eva Gajek is a historian specializing in the social, economic, and cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her research connects questions of social inequality with spatial analysis, elite studies, and the history of wealth. Starting in the research area "Contemporary History and Archive" in May 2025, she will co-lead the research project “Where the Rich Live: Mapping Villa Neighborhoods and Cultures of Wealth in Germany’s Long Twentieth Century” (RichMap) at the IRS. The project is part of the Leibniz Cooperative Excellence Programme and explores the spatial dimensions of wealth and social inequality in modern Germany.
In the winter term of 2024/25, Eva Gajek held the interim professorship for Social and Economic History at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Previously, she was a fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre Dynamics of Security (CRC 138) at the University of Marburg. From 2022 to 2024, she worked as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, and from 2019 to 2022 as a research associate in the Leibniz Research Group “History and Theory of Global Capitalism” at Justus Liebig University Giessen. From 2011 to 2019, she held a position as a research associate at the Chair of Historical Journalism at the same university's Department of History.
Eva Gajek studied modern history, the history of technology, economic and social history, and modern German literature at Ruhr University Bochum. She earned her PhD in 2011 as a fellow of the graduate programme “Transnational Media Events from the Early Modern Period to the Present” at Justus Liebig University Giessen. In 2024, she completed her habilitation at the same institution with a study on the knowledge and perception of wealth in Germany’s long twentieth century.
Her academic work has received several honors, including the Hedwig Hintze Prize awarded by the German Association of Historians (2014) and the Dissertation Prize of Justus Liebig University (2012). In 2016/17, she was a mentee in the mentoring programme Proprofessur for early-career women in academia, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the universities of Hesse. She is an associate member of the Leibniz Prize research group “Wealth and Social Inequality” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
Her research engages with the cultural history of the economic, with a particular focus on wealth, property, and social inequality. Additional interests include media history and European cultural history in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Portrait: © Astrid Dünkelmann
