Thank you for visiting us! The Department of History is part of Faculty 07: History and Cultural Studies at JGU Mainz, a faculty with an unusually diverse and broad range of subjects. These pages offer detailed information on the Department of History, our research activities, our course offerings, and the degree programs we supervise, as well as on the student advising office that administers these degree programs, and on current projects to which we would like to draw your attention.
Listed here are only members of staff of the student advising offices, the academic advising offices, and the commissioners of the Department of History. Individual research department staff members are listed on the websites of the corresponding research departments.
As Director of the Department of Universal History at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Prof. Dr. Johannes Paulmann is also Professor at the Department of History at JGU Mainz, but is permanently released from teaching duties. In practice, there is close collaboration between the JGU Mainz Department of History and the Leibniz Institute of European History, both in teaching (through Dr. Paulmann and employees of the institute) and in research (one example is the joint research training group “Die christlichen Kirchen vor der Herausforderung ‘Europa'”).
The student advising office at the Department of History is responsible for the administration of the bachelor’s and master’s degree programs at the Department of History. It is the point of contact for students and members of the teaching staff who have questions related to degree programs or Jogustine. You can reach the student advising office by visiting or calling, or by sending an email to the shared email address studienbuero-geschichte@uni-mainz.de. Please direct your inquiries to this address if you are not sure who to contact. Please do not send parallel emails to several members of the student advising staff.
- Responsible for the organization and coordination of the history degree programs
- Ensuring the proper admission of students to courses in accordance with examination law
- Quality assurance
- Further development of current degree programs
- Registration and deregistration of students for courses in the system
- Semester planning
- Advising students and teaching staff on examination issues
- Planning examination dates and examination times in coordination with the examiners and other responsible bodies
- Administration of exam registrations and exam data in Campusnet/JoguStine
- Registration and deregistration of students for examinations
Email: shahla@uni-mainz.de
Phone: (49)-6131-39-20195
Fax: (49)-6131-39-20324
Office: Philosophicum, Room 01-543
Office hours:
By appointment via email only
- Semester planning and administration of courses in Campusnet/JoguStine
- Room distribution
- Participation in the course-related work of the study management team
- Administration of teaching contracts
The course coordinators for each degree program form the link between the administrative work of the student advising offices and the academic tasks of the teaching staff. They are part of the university teaching staff. The course coordinators work closely with study management and are ultimately responsible for the proper implementation of the examination regulations and module catalogs. In addition, they are specifically tasked with dealing with cases of conflict between the student advising offices and the teaching staff.
The student council represents your interests in the program of study, informs and advises you in on matters related to studying at JGU, and organizes events. Do you want to get involved or find out more?
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz was one of the first new universities to be founded after the Second World War. It began teaching students on May 15, 1946. The founding of the university was accompanied by the establishment of the Department of Philosophy, whose only full professor (and at the same time founding dean of the school) was Leo Just. He was involved in the appointment of the historians Eugen Ewig and Theodor Schieffer. Initially, a general history seminar was planned; however, with the appointment of Hans Ulrich Instinsky as full professor of Ancient History in the winter semester 1948/1949 and the founding of an Institute for East European Studies in the winter semester 1949/1950, both Ancient History and East European History initially went their own institutional ways.
Over time, the Department of History grew to include six departments, including departments for Modern History, Medieval History, Medieval and Early Modern History, and Comparative Regional History (now: Late Medieval History and Comparative Regional History), Modern History, Byzantine Studies, and Contemporary History. The department of Eastern European History finally also joined the Department of History. In 2010, the Institute of Ancient History was added as a further department; at the same time, History Didactics was upgraded to a research department and the departmental structure was reformed on the basis of new organizational regulations. In summer 2017, a junior professorship for Economic History was added. Today, the Department of History presents itself as a general history department with an winning combination of different epochal, regional, and sectoral research departments and a correspondingly differentiated spectrum of course offerings and research activities. In the winter semester 2020/21, a professorship for the History and Culture of Islam in the Eastern Mediterranean was added to this thematically diverse offering.
Wojtynowski, Katja: Das Fach Geschichte an der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz 1946 – 1961: Gründung und Ausbau des Historischen Seminars, des Instituts für Alte Geschichte und der Abteilung Osteuropäische Geschichte am Institut für Osteuropakunde. Stuttgart 2006 [= Beiträge zur Geschichte der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Neue Folge, Band 4].
Johannes Gutenberg University is based on a fundamental system of freedom and democracy and is committed to the “development of a tolerant and open-minded set of values”. In this sense, the Department of History embodies mutual appreciation and tolerance. It stands for a peaceful, open-minded, and diverse university and condemns all forms of intolerance and discrimination.
The members of the Department of History are available as contact persons for all students who are personally affected by discrimination, violence, and threats of violence. We encourage you not to tolerate such actions, but to talk to us about them. In such cases, you can contact any members of the faculty of the Department of History, the student council and in particular the following contact persons: Dr. Andreas Goltz or Prof. Dr. Bettina Braun.
The Department of History conducts research within the individual research departments, in various collaborations across research departments, and in cooperations beyond the boundaries of the Department of History. You can find more detailed information about research within the Department of History below.
An overview of current and completed research and externally funded projects can be found on the pages of the research departments of the Department of History. These are linked below:
Are you interested in studying history in Mainz and want to know which international courses are offered? Are you studying history in Mainz and want to continue your program of study abroad temporarily or are you currently studying abroad and will be returning to Mainz? Are you coming from abroad and want to continue your history studies in Mainz on a temporary basis or are you currently attending courses at the Department of History? You can find information on studying abroad and our offers for international students in the subject of history here.
Johannes Gutenberg University and the Department of History offer special opportunities for programs of study abroad:
An internship in other European countries? Yes, please! Due to companies’ increasing globalization, more and more employers are attaching importance to university graduates gaining professional experience during their program of study. By completing an internship abroad, students show that they are flexible and able to navigate a foreign cultural environment with confidence and good language skills. An internship abroad offers an opportunity to gain this desired international experience without losing a lot of time, sometimes even during the semester break.
If you would like to be informed of all notifications from the Department of History without needing to visit the homepage, you can subscribe to our announcement blog as an RSS feed via Outlook, a different email program, or your own feed reader. To do so, please use this feed address: https://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb07geschichte/feed/rss/.
Students of history have excellent libraries at JGU Mainz, in Mainz as a whole and in the Rhine-Main region at their disposal. Below you will find some important libraries where you can do historical research. The university library also offers its own information service for the subject history:
The individual departmental libraries of the Philosophicum departmental library listed below can be found on the following map:
University Library
The University Library (UB) is JGU’s main supplier for literature. It is made up of the Central Library and a number of departmental libraries, whose collections can be searched through the UB’s catalogue.
The Central Library, which is often understood to be synonymous with the “University Library”, provides subject-specific information for students (e.g., in the form of the Central Textbook Collection (Zentrale Lehrbuchsammlung)) and holds interdisciplinary information resources as well as basic publications from other academic fields. It is the central lending library of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. You can work with the non-circulating collections in the Central Library; it also offers courses, user training, and advising.
Medieval and Modern History (Philosophicum)
The Philosophicum departmental library was created as a merger of all institute libraries in the Philosophicum. This made it possible to significantly extend opening hours, among other things. The Philosophicum departmental library is based on the concept of an “open library”. It is not a closed library area, but is integrated into the Philosophicum building with its offices, business rooms, student council rooms, and classrooms.
The Medieval and Modern History Library, probably the most important library for students of history, is part of this departmental library.
Ancient History (Philosophicum)
The Ancient History Library was established as the library of the Institute of Ancient History and contains literature relevant to the program of study of antiquity.
East European History (Philosophicum)
Due to its own history (the East European History department grew out of an independent Institute for East European Studies and was later integrated into the Department of History), the East European History Library is part of a joint library with the Department of Slavic Studies and therefore includes literature related to Eastern Europe in a broad sense.
Byzantine History (Philosophicum)
Only a few history departments have their own historical Byzantine studies department. The Byzantine Studies library is therefore quite valuable.
Historical Cultural Sciences (Philosophicum)
The Research Unit on Historical Cultural Sciences is a cross-faculty and cross-disciplinary institution for the networking and promotion of empirical cultural studies work with a historical perspective. It was established in 2008 as part of Mainz University’s profile-building strategy in the context of the Rhineland-Palatinate Research Initiative 2008–2011.
Institute for European History
With around 80,000 titles, the institute’s library offers literature on the history of the Holy Roman Empire from the late Middle Ages to 1806, on German history since the French Revolution, on the history of international relations in Europe since 1648, and on the history of the church, of dogma, and the theology of the late Middle Ages and the Reformation and their European impact. The library holds numerous international journals and periodicals. It has subscriptions for more than 500 international journals and periodicals.
Institute of Historical Regional Studies Rhineland-Palatinate
The Institute of Historical Regional Studies has an extensive collection of books and periodicals. The collection focuses on the history of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate (or the historical areas in today’s state) from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Interested researchers and students can use the reference library by appointment.
Scientific City Library and Public Library Anna Seghers
Academy of Sciences and Literature
Leibniz Center for Archaeology
Hessian State Library (Wiesbaden)
The Hessian State Library is an old collection library with legal deposit rights for the printed cultural heritage of the region. It has collections that complement those of the Mainz libraries very well, not only in terms of regional topics, but also in terms of general history.
University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg (Frankfurt am Main)
What the JGU Mainz University Library does for Mainz University, the Johann Christian Senckenberg University Library does for Frankfurt – and more. As a product of the merger of the Frankfurt am Main City and University Library and the Senckenberg Library, its extensive collections and holdings make it one of the central academic libraries in the Federal Republic of Germany. It functions as an academic library for the city of Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region, as a university library with numerous regional tasks, and as a focal library within the supra-regional literature supply.
German National Library (Frankfurt am Main)
The German National Library is the central archive library and national bibliographic center of the Federal Republic of Germany. It is the only library in Germany with the task of collecting, permanently archiving, comprehensively documenting, and bibliographically recording all German and German-language publications from 1913 onwards, German literature published abroad, and translations of German-language works, as well as the works of all German-speaking emigrants published between 1933 and 1945, and making them available to the public.
The association was founded on February 24, 1999, by teaching staff, senior students, and student representatives at what was then Faculty 16 of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz with the aim of promoting historical studies through intergenerational cooperation between university members, current and former students, and interested citizens. According to its statutes, its purpose is in particular “the idealistic and financial promotion of teaching and research activities as well as the promotion of students of historical sciences, to be done through supporting lectures, book acquisitions, scientific projects, field trips, publications, and other forms of communicating scientific results to a broader public.”
