About

Victoria Bergbauer is a cultural and social historian of modern Europe and its global entanglements (PhD Princeton University, July 2025). By reconstructing archived life-stories, she examines how carceral regimes and their aftermaths have shaped modern concepts of freedom and state formation. Her dissertation, entitled “Fragments of Freedom: Incarcerated Adolescents and their Afterlives in Nineteenth-Century Europe” provides the first transnational history of formerly incarcerated individuals, tracing how their trajectories were embedded in broader legal, political, and economic frameworks. She is the co-editor of “Carceral Architecture: From Within and Beyond the Prison Walls,” forthcoming with Jovis-de Gruyter in September 2025.

After earning an undergraduate degree at University College London, Victoria completed her MA research degree and thesis, entitled “La Marque de la Prison : Trajectoires des jeunes libérées en France (1830-1880)”, in Contemporary History at the Université de Paris-1, Panthéon Sorbonne.

Her broader research on normalization has appeared in English, French, and Italian publications and is the result of wide-ranging archival consultations and qualitative data analysis. She has been enthusiastic to present the results of this work at international conferences and as an invited speaker in the US, Latin America, and across Europe. 

See my CV.