Rolf Bauer

Rolf Bauer

Contact: 

E-mail: rolf.bauer@univie.ac.at

Rolf Bauer, born 1984, studied Development Studies (MA) and History (PhD) at the University of Vienna. He is interested in the economic, social and environmental history of South Asia with a focus on labour relations, agriculture, commodity frontiers, psychoactive substances and disasters.

In 2019 he published his first monograph The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India with Brill. Last year (2023), the volume Global Agricultural Workers from the 17th to the 21st Century, which he co-edited with Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, was published in the Studies in Global Social History Series (Brill).

He has held visiting professorships in the field of Economic and Social History and Global History at Central European University and the University of Vienna. Since fall 2022 he has been visiting professor for Modern South Asia at this department.

Research focus

Rolf Bauer’s current research focus is the field of historical disaster studies. He conducts a comparative analysis of three famines in late 19th century north India. The basic question is how societies in colonial India dealt with droughts and what socioeconomic factors increased or mitigated the effects of droughts.