Prof. Dr. Angelika Epple

Angelika Epple has been Rector of Bielefeld University since 1 October 2023, having previously served two years as Vice-Rector for Research and International Affairs and six years as Vice-Rector for International Affairs and Diversity, also at Bielefeld University.

As a professor of 19th and 20th century history at the Faculty of History, Philosophy and Theology, her research focuses on the theory of history, the history of globalisation since the early modern period and global microhistory. She served as dean/prodean for her faculty for over four years.

Angelika Epple serves on several advisory boards, inter alia as Chair of the Forschungsinstitut für Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt (Research Institute for Social Cohesion) since September 2021. From January 2017 to May 2021 she was the spokesperson for SFB 1288 "Practices of Comparison. Ordering and Changing the World". She is PI in the RTG "World Politics: The emergence of political arenas and modes of observation in world society orders" and at the Center for Advanced Latin-American Studies (CALAS). From 2013 to 2017 she was deputy spokesperson of the interdisciplinary BMBF project "The Americas as an Interweaving Space" and from 2011-2017 she was a member of the board of the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS) and the Center for American Studies (CIAS).

Angelika Epple first studied Hispanic Studies at the University of Málaga in southern Spain. She continued her studies in Romance languages and literature at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg and the Freie University of Berlin, followed by history, German studies, educational science and philosophy.

She received her doctorate in 2001 in Bielefeld with a gender-historical thesis on the history of historiography, and subsequently worked as an assistant professor at the University of Hamburg. She wrote a history of the global player "Gebr. Stollwerck" in the 19th and early 20th century and traced the colonial history of chocolate. She is currently working on an introduction to global history/global microhistory. She received research grants for stays of several months at the German Historical Institutes in London and Washington D.C. She obtained her habilitation at the University of Hamburg in 2008. Before accepting the call to Bielefeld University, Angelika Epple taught as an academic senior lecturer at the University of Freiburg. In 2014 and 2017, she was a visiting professor at the universities of Guadalajara, Mexico, and Bologna, Italy, for one month each.