Steffen Rimner is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Harvard University as well as Graduate Student Associate and Weatherhead Center Dissertation Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
After acquiring his background in the modern histories of China, Japan, European imperialism and transnational relations in Konstanz, Taipei and Yale, he embarked on a Ph.D. in international and global history at Harvard in 2008. His dissertation, to be finished in 2013, is supervised by Professors Erez Manela, Charles S. Maier and Akira Iriye.
His first book, under contract with Harvard University Press, is based on archival research in six languages and eleven countries across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Western Europe and North America. It explores the social, ideological, economic and political origins of global narcotics control in transnational perspective, from protests against the Asian opium trade to the League of Nations.
Formerly the John Clive Fellow at Harvard University, a member of the Executive Committee and a Canada Research Fellow, the two latter at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, he has also been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Columbia University, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Harvard University Asia Center, the Harvard Committee on Australian Studies, the Jens Aubrey Westengard Fund and the Department of History at Harvard, among others.
In the summer of 2013 and 2014, he will be a fellow at the SIAS Summer Institutes on “Cultural Encounters: Global Perspectives, Local Exchanges, 1750-1940”, a joint, multinational initiative of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Collegium Budapest, the Institute for Advanced Study at Hebrew University Jerusalem, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center at Research Triangle Park, NC, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study at Wassenaar, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at Uppsala and the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin).
Steffen's broader research interests traverse the history of international public opinion, of international public health, of the movements of international ideologies, of the training in and practice of international law, the transition from multi-imperial to multilateral relations, the past and present of international organizations of global governance, from the League of Nations to the United Nations, and of international civil society in its interaction with world politics.