Patricia Hertel is visiting professor for global history at the Free University Berlin in the academic year 2023/2024. She is a researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin and Privatdozentin at the University of Basel.

As a historian for nineteenth and twentieth century Europe, she focuses on transnational history and cultural history. Her second book (under contract with De Gruyter) examines tourism to the Western European dictatorships. Currently, she investigates the history of professional travel in the age of aviation.

After a training as a publishing manager, she studied German Philology, History, and Portuguese Philology at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Parallel to her university studies, she trained as a journalist and did freelance work for the press and radio. She concluded her doctoral studies at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) with a PhD thesis entitled The Crescent Remembered: Islam and Nationalism on the Iberian Peninsula before going on to hold the position of postdoc researcher at the University of Basel. With the support of an Advanced Postdoc.Mobility Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation, she has been a visiting scholar at King’s College London, the German Historical Institute London, the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and the Universitat de València. As a lecturer at the universities of Basel, St. Gallen, Lucerne, and Fribourg/Switzerland, she has taught over the past decade modern and contemporary European history, as well as academic history writing.

Patricia Hertel specialises in European history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on transnational history and cultural history. Her research interests include:

• History of tourism, travel, and mobility
• History of infrastructure and its uses 
• History of international relations
• Nations and nationalism
• Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes
• Spatial concepts and ideas, mental mapping

Monographs

Patricia Hertel, Europe’s Favourite Dictatorships. Southern Authoritarianism, Tourism, and the “Free West”, 1945 – 1975 (Habilitation thesis, under contract with de Gruyter).

Patricia Hertel, Der erinnerte Halbmond. Islam und Nationalismus auf der Iberischen Halbinsel im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Ordnungssysteme – Studien zur Ideengeschichte der Neuzeit, vol. 40), Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2012.

English edition

Patricia Hertel, The Crescent Remembered: Islam and Nationalism in the Iberian Peninsula (Sussex Studies in Spanish History), trans. by Ellen Yutzy Glebe, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2015.

Reviewed in:

• Revista de Estudios Internacionales Mediterráneos 28 (2020), pp. 220-224.
• Bulletin of Spanish Studies 95 (2018), no. 4, pp. 363-364.
• Revista Espaço Acadêmico 17 (2017), no. 192, pp. 194 – 196.
• English Historical Review 132 (2017), no. 555, pp. 420–421.
• Jadaliyya, 22.01.2017.
• Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 41 (2016).
• Spagna Contemporanea 14 (2015), no. 48.
• Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 65 (2015), no. 2.
• Iberoamericana 14 (2014), no. 56, pp. 265–267.
• sehepunkte 13 (2013), no. 3 [15.03.2013]
• H-Soz-u-Kult, 01.11.2013.