Sebastian Felten studied history at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin and King's College London, where he received his PhD in 2015. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin and Stanford University, and is currently associate professor of Early Modern History of Science at the University of Vienna. His first book, Money in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2022), explores how everyday practices of exchange shaped and sustained plural monetary systems in the early modern world. His current research, supported by an ERC Starting Grant, examines the administration of mineral resource extraction in Central Europe between 1550 and 1850. He is co-speaker of the Research Cluster “History of Science” at the University of Vienna, recipient of the City of Vienna’s Förderungspreis (2025), and elected member of the Young Academy at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

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Research

Sebastian Felten investigates how early modern actors exploited natural and human resources to gain wealth and knowledge. His research connects the history of science with social, cultural, and financial history, using tools from historical epistemology to ask how knowledge and value were produced and organised.

His first book, Money in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2022), merged methods from the history of science and economic history to show how everyday practices of assaying and accounting gave ordinary users — peasants, craftsmen, merchants — considerable agency over plural monetary systems, and how that agency was curtailed when uniform national currency was imposed in the nineteenth century.

Through two collaborative working groups — on "Bureaucracy as Knowledge" (with Christine von Oertzen, published in the Journal for the History of Knowledge, 2020) and "Resources in the Early Modern World" (with Renée Raphael, published in Isis, 2023) — Felten helped develop new frameworks for studying how bureaucratic procedures produce knowledge and how historical actors understood their relationship with the material world.

These threads come together in his ERC Starting Grant project, SCARCE (2023–2028), which investigates mineral extraction in Central Europe from c.1500 to 1900. The project provides a critical history of today's stakeholder conflicts by showing how contradictory principles of resource management – economic development, sustainability, and technological innovation – were forged in proto-industrial settings. It explores alternative, historical ways of provisioning for communities, making them available for current debates on environmental degradation and climate emergency.

Selected publications

Money in the Dutch Republic: Everyday Practice and Circuits of Exchange (Cambridge University Press, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009106375.

‘Beyond National Currency: The Plurality of Early Modern Money’, History Compass 24, no. 1 (2026): e70026, https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.70026.

‘Focus Section: Resources in the Early Modern World’, Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 114, no. 3 (2023): 599–645, ed. (with Renée Raphael), https://doi.org/10.1086/726186.

Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge, inaugural Special Issue of Journal for the History of Knowledge (2020), ed. (with Christine von Oertzen), https://journalhistoryknowledge.org/histories-of-bureaucratic-knowledge.

‘The Pen at Work: Codifying Mining Techniques in Central Europe (ca. 1750-1820)’, Artefact: Techniques, Histoire et Sciences Humaines 22 (2025): 67–105, https://doi.org/10.4000/14bha.

‘Mining Culture, Labour, and the State in Early Modern Saxony’, Renaissance Studies 34, no. 1 (2020): 119–48, https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12583.

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ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8194-4112

Open-access versions of published work can be found on https://phaidra.univie.ac.at.

Doctoral Supervision and Teaching

Sebastian Leitner, “Holz- und Holzkohleversorgung als politische Ökologie. Das Beispiel der niederungarischen Bergstädte im langen 16. Jahrhundert” (ca. 1495 - ca. 1620)”  (2024-)

Sarah Seinitzer, “Metals as Poison and Medicine. The Ambivalent Nature of Mercury in 16th- and 17th-Century Italian Medicine and Their Extraction from the Eastern Alpine Mines of Idrija” (2024-)

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Teaching at University of Vienna: https://ufind.univie.ac.at/de/person.html?id=105238

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Queer Vienna: Knowledge and Counter-Knowledge in an Emancipatory Archive

Important achievements of the LGBTQ movements against bad or ill-used science have been rolled back or questioned across Europe. To counter these tendencies, this research and writing workshop will ask: What tools, sites, forms of communication, and technologies constitute the counter-knowledge that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer people have developed to understand themselves and communicate to others? Students at the University of Vienna will conducted archival research at QWIEN Centre for Queer History Vienna and published their findings in the international open-access journal Æther: 

Andreas Brunner, Sebastian Felten, and Hannes Sulzenbacher., eds, Queer Vienna: Einblicke in ein Bewegungsarchiv, Æther 08 (intercom, 2023), https://aether.ethz.ch/ausgabe/queer-vienna/.

Curriculum Vitae

Research

Professional Service

Publications