Alexander C.T. Geppert

Alexander C.T. Geppert is Associate Professor of History and European Studies, and Global Network Associate Professor at New York University, jointly appointed by NYU Shanghai and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU New York. He is also an associated member of NYU’s History Department in New York. 

 

Alexander Geppert holds four history degrees: a B.A. from Universität Bielefeld, an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. From 2010 to 2016 he directed the Emmy Noether Research Group 'The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century' at Freie Universität Berlin. He has held fellowships at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the IFK Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, the German Historical Institutes in London and Paris, at Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Deutsches Museum. In 2018 NASA and the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) awarded him their Fellowship in Aerospace History. In 2019–2020 Alexander Geppert held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. During the academic year 2021–2022 he served as the Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. During 2026 Alexander Geppert will be in residence at the Hanse Institute of Advanced Study in northern Germany. He convenes the NYU Space Talks: History, Politics, Astroculture lecture series and directs a research group on planetary history, with graduate students, junior, mid-career and senior scholars from four continents.