Michael Goebel is the Einstein Professor of Global History and co-director of the Frankreich-Zentrum at Freie Universität Berlin. He earned his Ph.D. from University College London (2006) and in 2018–21 was the Pierre du Bois Chair Europe and the World at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Originally an intellectual historian of Latin America, his 2015 book Anti-Imperial Metropolis awakened a growing interest in urban history and, more recently, social and economic history. He is currently the principal investigator of the SNSF-funded project Patchwork Cities.

During his fellowship at gd:c, he’s investigating the interrelationship between globalisation and inequality in Latin American and Southeast Asian port cities, particularly in the late-nineteenth century. His key interest is how the global development of capitalism and imperialism intersected with local socio-economic transformations in urban space, focusing on the interplay between ethnicity, migration and real-estate markets. His research thus connects to scholarship about segregation, but seeks to expand its purview beyond its customary focus on the North Atlantic.