Axel Körner - Biography#
Axel Körner is Professor of Modern Cultural and Intellectual History at Leipzig University and Honorary Professor at University College London. After undergraduate studies at FU and TU Berlin, he obtained a Maîtrise d'Histoire from Lyon II, France (1991) and a PhD from the European University Institute, Florence (1995). He held visiting positions at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and at New York University. In addition to modern Italian, European and Habsburg history, as well as transnational history and the history of political thought, he published widely on the history of opera and music in transnational perspective. His America in Italy. The United States in the Political Thought and Imagination of the Risorgimento, 1763 - 1865 (Princeton, 2017) won the Helen & Howard Marraro Prize of the American Historical Association.
His main area of interest is the cultural and intellectual history of Europe between the late 18th and the early 20th centuries. Most of his work is in the fields of Italian, French, German and Habsburg History, with a specific focus on the transnational flow of ideas, goods and people. A particular field of cross-disciplinary research is European music theatre, in particular nineteenth-century Italian and German opera. He was PI of an international network of opera scholars, financed by the Leverhulme Trust and based at UCL, Cambridge, Brown and Campinas (Brazil), investigating the role of Italian opera in the world. In 2021 he won an ERC Avanced Investigator Grant for research on a project entitled "Opera and the Politics of Empire in Habsburg Europe, 1815 - 1914“.
His publications include a monograph on the French and German labour movements during the nineteenth century (Frankfurt/M. 1997), as well as Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy: From Unification to Fascism (2008; 2011). His monograph America in Italy. The United States in the Political Thought and Imagination of the Risorgimento, 1763 - 1865 (Princeton, 2017) won the Helen & Howard Marraro Prize of the American Historical Association.
