Luise Schorn-Schütte) at the Faculty of History and Philosophy. He wrote his dissertation thesis on the relations between Barbary corsairs and Northern Europeans in the early modern age with a specific focus on Denmark, the Netherlands and the Hanseatic cities. He has published mostly in the field of socio-economic, maritime and global history of the early modern age. He is currently writing a book on the network and strategies of the German merchant community in eighteenth-century Venice with special attention on the city’s’ function as an information hub.