Anne Schult is a historian of modern Europe, with a focus on Germany, Britain, and France.
Her research engages with the history of migration across European nations and empires and the ways in which migration and displacement have been theorized in the human sciences.
She is currently at work on her first book, Counting the Countless: Statistics, Demography, and the Twentieth-Century Refugee. Set against the conventional narrative of increasing legal protection, it tells the unknown story of how the modern refugee was made by the quantitative social sciences in the era of two World Wars. Drawing on archives in Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the US, Schult argues that statisticians and demographers devised an intellectual framework for identifying, classifying, and controlling refugees via numbers. These numbers, in turn, became directly involved in international refugee policy as it was enacted.
At WashU, Schult teaches surveys on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe as well as seminars on racial and social othering, transatlantic migration, and humanitarianism.