Agnes Gehbald

• Global Book History
• Migration and Mobility
• Transatlantic Connections
• Colonial and Imperial History
• Latin American History

• Transatlantic Return Migration around 1900: From the Americas to Europe, Postdoc-Projekt
   

• Slavery and Print Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean
  Slavery was woven into the fabric of Latin American and Caribbean societies, and print did not stand apart from it. From the colonial era through the post-colonial period, enslaved and free people of African descent helped produce, circulate, and interpret printed texts, and their labour and ideas left a lasting mark on print culture. Together with a group of colleagues working on the subject, we examine how print media operated simultaneously as a mechanism of exclusion – shaped by barriers of literacy, geography, and economic means – and as a conduit that linked individuals across social and racial divides. Despite many exclusions and silences, enslaved and free Afro-Latin Americans contributed to and engaged with print culture, navigating the constraints of deeply hierarchical and segregated societies. By following these engagements, we aim to show how print shaped the experience of slavery and freedom in the region, and how Afrodescendants in turn shaped print from the sixteenth through the early twentieth century.

• A Colonial Book Market: Peruvian Print Culture in the Age of Enlightenment
  Based on the research for my PhD project, this volume provides a wholly original social history of books in late colonial Peru. From the second half of the eighteenth century onward, workshops in Lima and transoceanic imports supplied the market with unprecedented quantities of print publications. By tracing the variety of printed commodities that were circulating in the urban sphere, as well as analysing the spatiality of the trade and the materiality of the books themselves, I assess the meaning of print culture in the everyday lives of the viceroyalty. I reveal how books permeated late colonial society on a broad scale and how they figured as objects in the inventories of diverse individuals, both women and men, who, in previous centuries, had been far less likely to possess them. A Colonial Book Market uncovers how people in Peruvian cities gained access to reading material and participated in the global Enlightenment project.

Monograph:

• A Colonial Book Market: Peruvian Print Culture in the Age of Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2023.

Edited Volumes:

• Agnes Gehbald, Philipp Horn, Rea Vogt. Atlantic Crossings: Temporary Migration and Labour around 1900, in: Comparativ 35: 1-2 (2025).
• Agnes Gehbald & Nora E. Jiménez. Libros en movimiento: Nueva España y Perú XVI–XVIII, Zamora, Michoacán: Colegio de Michoacán 2021.

Journal Articles & Book Chapters (Selection)

• Agnes Gehbald. Earning and Returning: Emigrant Registration and Migration Statistics in the Americas (1857–1911), in: Comparativ 35: 1-2 (2025), 47-65
• Agnes Gehbald. Women in the Workshop: Property Structure, Female Management, and Print Culture in Colonial Peru, in: Gender and the Book Trades, ed. by Jessica Farrell-Jobst & Elise Watson, Leiden: Brill (2025), 54-64.
• Agnes Gehbald. “Riesige Personenzahlen”: Transatlantische Rückwanderungen von Buenos Aires und New York um 1900, in: Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 64 (2024), 41-64.
• Agnes Gehbald. Punch-Cutting in Colonial Peru: Printers’ Type, Liberal Reform, and the Freedom of the Press, in: Book History 27: 2 (2024), 283-308.
• Agnes Gehbald. Buchhandelsmonopol. Die Hoheit über das gedruckte Wort zur Kolonialzeit, in: Das Amerika-Monopol: Vorstellung und Wirklichkeit des spanischen Kolonialhandels, ed. by Martin Biersack, Eberhard Crailsheim, Klemens Kaps, Wien: Mandelbaum Verlag 2024, 147-164.
• Agnes Gehbald. A Pious Privilege: Printing for Hospitals and Orphanages across the Spanish Empire, in: Book Markets in Mediterranean Europe and Latin America: Institutions and Strategies (15^th–18^th Centuries), ed. by Natalia Maillard Álvarez & Montserrat Cachero Vinuesa, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2023, 35-63.
• Agnes Gehbald. Lima Inside and Out: City Criticism and Transatlantic Book Confiscation around 1800, in: Global Nineteenth-Century Studies 1: 2 (2022), 141-160.
• Agnes Gehbald. Druckprojekte indigener Sprachen im Vizekönigreich Peru: Publizierbarkeit und unveröffentlichte Manuskripte, in: Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 59 (2022), 181-217.
• Agnes Gehbald & Carlos Zegarra Moretti. Libros en los Andes: la biblioteca robada del cura indígena Fernando Ramos Titu Atauchi (1809), in: Revista Complutense de Historia de América 47 (2021), 181-208.

BORIS-Profil (Bern Open Repository and Information System)

HS 2026 Übung
Biographische Navigation: Subjekt, Struktur und Mobilität im langen 19. Jahrhundert

FS 2025 Quellenkurs
Von Papier zu Pixel: Auswandererbriefe in Archiven und digitalen Datenbanken

HS 2024 Übung
Weltmärkte: Globale Güter und Kommodifizierung der Arbeit in der longue durée

FS 2024 Proseminar
Bauern, Dienstbotinnen, Fabrikarbeiter: Transatlantische Migration und Arbeit im 19. Jahrhundert

FS 2022 Lektürekurs
Theorien und Turns in der Geschichte

HS 2021 Proseminar
Hafenstädte weltweit. Globalisierung zur Zeit der Dampfschifffahrt