Fellow Focus: Victoria Bergbauer

2025-26 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Victoria Bergbauer received her PhD from Princeton University. As a cultural and social historian of modern Europe and its global entanglements, Victoria reconstrcuts archived life-stories to examine how carceral regimes and their aftermaths have shaped modern concepts of freedom and state formation.

In this conversation with Communications & Outreach Coordinator Karl-Mary Akre, Victoria discusses her book project and how her fellowship experience and time in Atlanta has pulled her research closer to the present.

KARL-MARY AKRE: Thank you, Victoria. I appreciate you taking the time to speak to me about your work. Can you tell me more about your journey to the research you're currently working on?

VICTORIA BERGBAUER: This project began during my master’s degree in Paris, where I was working on the dynamics of nineteenth-century incarceration. That research convinced me that I wanted to pursue a PhD, and the further I went, the more I noticed a striking silence in the field. Historians have written a great deal about imprisonment itself, but almost nothing about what happens after the moment of release. We know that this is a profoundly impactful experience, yet the historiography has largely left it unexamined. So, my question started simply with what happens after imprisonment? Of course, that’s only simple on the surface. The answer has many layers.

And how does your research project intersect with the Fox Center's theme year "Life/Story"?

I would describe my dissertation as a cultural and social history, with political and intellectual dimensions. I reconstruct the trajectories of formerly incarcerated adolescents to trace the concrete impact that imprisonment left on their lives. I also explore how ideas of reform and punishment were formed. What are the strategies that politicians, state officials, reformers, and religious representatives developed in the nineteenth century, and how do these ideas continue to structure our present moment?  

I also work with what I call conceptual architecture and reconstruct how ideas about punishment and rehabilitation get built into both legal frameworks and physical spaces. Prisons in the nineteenth century were not uniform. You had religious asylums, reformatories, penitentiaries, farm schools…each space had its own material form, and each form expressed a particular ambition about what imprisonment was supposed to do. It is tempting to treat “the Prison” as a realm sealed off from free society, but when you look closely at these spaces (their architecture, their layouts, the lives they were designed to shape) they reveal how free society imagined itself.

How do you think the Fox Center fellowship has impacted your work process as you delve into this "conceptual architecture"?

To understand what happens in the aftermath of incarceration, I cannot solely rely on a study of laws, reform debates, architecture, or financing. I need to follow the people who experienced systems of control firsthand and reconstruct their stories. The Fox Center’s theme and our seminar conversations have pushed me to think more carefully about how to do this. I’m tracing the trajectories of adolescents across decades after their release, and it is a real historical challenge, because once someone leaves a space of confinement, the traces thin out.

So, these life stories guide my research, and working through them has been the heart of my time at the Fox. Our seminars keep returning to a question I find incredibly generative: when is a single life exceptional, and when does it stand in for something broader?

At this point in your academic career, how do you feel the Fox Center Fellowship has shaped your understanding of your work and your place within your field more broadly?

The fellowship has formed the project in ways I had not anticipated. My book project is about lives that took place two hundred years ago, but I have always wanted to connect these stories from the past with the present. Writing it in the United States, the country with the highest incarceration rate, made it feel impossible for me to keep this history at a distant past. The conversations that I have had here with my colleagues and with people whom I have met in Atlanta have pulled the project closer to the present in ways I think will shape it for years.

How have you enjoyed Atlana and Emory so far? Have there been elements here that have helped you personally or in your research?

I’d never been to Georgia before I moved here. Driving down from New Jersey with a packed car, through Tennessee, I was seeing a side of the country I hadn’t encountered before. I didn’t arrive with any fixed image of Atlanta in my head, and what’s struck me most is how much the city is in motion. So many people are arriving, staying, and leaving. This motion makes for remarkable conversations. I’ve heard life stories from people whose families have been here for generations and from people who had just gotten here, and both kinds of stories feel essential to the place. And then there are the trees. I know everyone says it, but I genuinely didn’t expect the green. Every morning driving to campus, I’m still surprised by it.

Teaching at Emory has also been an impactful experience for me. This semester I was teaching a seminar that I called “Troublemakers,” which moves week by week through discussing figures labeled unruly, dangerous, incorrigible, wayward and through the buildings built to contain them, from the Panopticon to the Magdalene Laundries. My students have made this course come alive, arriving with sharp questions that led us to have great discussions about modern European history.

Between the Fox seminars, the city, and the classroom, this year has been such a generative one in so many ways.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.