Professional Affiliation

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Bundeswehr University Munich (Germany)

Expert Bio

Currently, Stefan Huebner is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Bundeswehr University Munich (Germany). In July 2016, he will start a Research Fellowship at National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute. In spring 2016, he is a Public Policy Fellow at the Wilson Center. His second book project is a global history of oceanic colonization projects. He received his Ph.D. from Jacobs University Bremen (Germany) in 2014. His Ph.D. research covered the impact of regional Asian sports events – established by the American YMCA – on modernization and development processes in Asia. His book – Pan-Asian Sports and the Emergence of Modern Asia, 1913-1974 – was published by National University of Singapore Press in April 2016. Huebner was awarded a Visiting Scholarship at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, a Doctoral and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the German Historical Institute Washington, DC, and a Doctoral Fellowship at the German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo.

Wilson Center Project

City upon the Sea. Global Capitalism from Offshore Oil to Humanity’s Colonization of the Ocean

Project Summary

This project investigates the global development of humanity’s completely new anthropogenic colonization of the ocean. The central aim is to analyze why and how oceanic colonization reshaped the character of global capitalism. Colonization strongly increased humanity’s access to food and energy resources, which allowed huge improvements in living standards and a massive rise in human population. Moreover, it permanently changed our perception of nature, of the spatial distribution of the planet, and contributed to a stronger global consciousness. Although myths and ideas of oceanic colonization go back more than two millennia in time, its successful large-scale implementation started only in the twentieth century. Offshore oil drilling and mariculture (cultivation of marine organisms), in particular, rapidly gained in importance, inspiring various other projects of oceanic colonization, ranging from artificial islands to futuristic floating mobile cities.

Major Publications

Stefan Huebner, Pan-Asian Sports and the Emergence of Modern Asia, 1913-1974. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2016; distribution in cooperation with University of Chicago Press.

Stefan Hübner, “Muscular Christianity and the ‘Western Civilizing Mission’: Elwood S. Brown, the YMCA and the Idea of the Far Eastern Championship Games,” in: Diplomatic History 39,3 (2015), 532-557.

Stefan Hübner, “National Socialist Foreign Policy and Press Instructions, 1933-1939: Aims and Ways of Coverage Manipulation based on the Example of East Asia,” in: International History Review 34,2 (2012), 271-291.