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Inštitut za novejšo zgodovino
Visiting Fellowship 2025/26

Stefan Rindlisbacher, PhD

Postdoc
Department of Contemporary History, University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Visiting Fellowship 2025/26 (March 15, 2026 – April 1, 2026)

Stefan Rindlisbacher is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Fribourg. He is part of the research project “Counter Media: Periodicals of the New Left and the New Right” (since 2024), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam (2022), the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna (2023), and the Department of Economic, Social, and Environmental History at the University of Bern (2024). His research focuses on the history of social movements, environmental history, the history of the body, postcolonialism and the history of the Far Right.

Statement of interest

My current research project explores the involvement of far-right actors and ideologies in nature and environmental protection movements in Germany, Austria and Switzerland throughout the twentieth century. The project aims to demonstrate that ecological concerns have not only been promoted by democratic civil society, but have also frequently been associated with racist, eugenicist and antisemitic beliefs. As part of this research, I am developing a follow-up project to study the largely overlooked history of Green parties in various European countries. While several studies exist on the German and French Greens, historical research on smaller European countries remains scarce. One of my goals is to map the different ideological currents that contributed to the emergence of Green parties, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. I plan to include three or four smaller European countries, such as Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia, in this comparative, explicitly transnational project in order to trace cross-border influences, shared trajectories, and divergent developments in the emergence of Green parties. During my stay in Ljubljana, I would like to examine the available sources on the history of the Greens in Slovenia and discuss the planned research project with colleagues there.

Selected publications

  • Stefan Rindlisbacher/Eva Locher/Damir Skenderovic: Transnational, kolonial, aktuell. Neue Perspektiven auf die Geschichte der Lebensreform, Basel/Berlin 2024. (Open Access)
  • Stefan Rindlisbacher: La « Nouvelle Droite » écologique au XXIe siècle. Post-croissance, biorégionalisme et « réforme de la vie », in: Allemagne d’aujourd’hui, 245 (2023), pp. 117–128.
  • Die Geschichte eines rechten Antimodernismus? Von der Lebensreformbewegung zu den Gegner:innen der Maßnahmen in der Coronavirus-Pandemie, in: Zeitgeschichte-online, Januar 2024, https://zeitgeschichte-online.de/themen/die-geschichte-eines-rechten-antimodernismus
  • Lebensreform in der Schweiz (1850-1950). Vegetarisch essen, nackt baden und im Grünen wohnen, Berlin u. a. 2022. (Open Access)
E-mail:
stefan.rindlisbacher@unifr.ch