Frederike Victoria Lange
Frederike Victoria Lange is a cultural geographer and a current Doctoral Researcher at the German Mining Museum Bochum. She holds a Master of Arts in Cultural Geography from Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, where she won the FGG Prize for Best Thesis of the Year, as well as a Bachelor of Science in Geography from the University of Leipzig. Since May 2025, she has been working within a DFG/AHRC-funded project focused on the socio-natural landscapes of extraction and pollution, supervised by Jun.-Prof. Dr. Tina Asmussen. Previously, she served as a Research Assistant in Social Geography at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Alongside her doctoral studies, Lange is the project manager for an art-based research initiative on uranium mining in the German-Czech Ore Mountains, highlighting her multifaceted engagement with historical and cultural geographies.
Research interests
Lange’s research centres on the long-term environmental and societal consequences of resource extraction, particularly the toxic legacies of mining in regions like the Harz and the German-Czech Ore Mountains. Her dissertation specifically investigates historical soil, forest, and water contamination in the Harz landscape from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. She explores these ecological realities using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines archival-historical reconstruction, GIS-based cartography, and on-site walk-along interviews. Her work intriguingly contrasts the idealised visions of the Harz found in Romantic literature, such as Heine’s Die Harzreise, with the material and environmental damage documented in mining archives. Through her investigations, she aims to contribute to mid-range theories of resource-related transformations by exploring the complex intersections of resources, regional identity, and environmental knowledge.