Maria Rhode is senior lecturer at the historical seminar (Seminar für Mittlere und Neuere Geschichte) at Göttingen University. There, she teaches courses on (East)-European history covering the field of cultural and constitutional history, including the history of nationalism.

Maria received her doctorate at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg in 1994. Her PhD was based on archival research on the institution of the interregnum in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In the last years, her focus of interest shifted towards the history of science and the hidden colonial entanglements of Polish scientists.

While in Lviv Maria will work on the anthropological school of Jan Czekanowski, the so-called Polish school, looking for continuities and discontinuities in the discipline especially during the period of extremes 1939-1944. While during the Soviet time, Lviv university still worked, the German occupation of the city marked the end of any unversitary education. However, German authorities established a branch of the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit in Lviv as a core of a future German university, using the former library and osteological collections.

Her analysis follows the concept of a science in context and will concentrate on relations between persons and institutions and their impact on the field of anthropology.The autobiographical materials available an the Center for Urban History will perfectly contribute to her study.

Maria has previously been a fellow of the German Historical Institute in Warsaw.