Victoria BergbauerMellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Victoria Bergbauer is a cultural and social historian of modern Europe and its global entanglements (PhD Princeton University, July 2025).

By reconstructing archived life-stories, she examines how carceral regimes and their aftermaths have shaped modern concepts of freedom and state formation. Her dissertation, entitled “Fragments of Freedom: Incarcerated Adolescents and their Afterlives in Nineteenth-Century Europe” provides the first transnational history of formerly incarcerated individuals, tracing how their trajectories were embedded in broader legal, political, and economic frameworks. She is the co-editor of “Carceral Architecture: From Within and Beyond the Prison Walls,” forthcoming with Jovis-de Gruyter in September 2025, and her work has appeared in English- and French-language journals.  

At the Fox Center, Bergbauer will revise her dissertation into a monograph that exposes dynamics of migration, empire, citizenship, and space through the prism of individual experiences. She will continue her collaborative project on the global intersections of imprisonment and migration and plans to complete two articles on the silence about race in European carceral files and the connections between the past and the present of prison economies.