Britta Schilling’s research focuses on the cultural memory and legacies of empire, as well as the experience of empire in everyday life.

Schilling's first book, Postcolonial Germany: Memories of Empire in a Decolonized Nation was published in 2014 by Oxford University Press. It is based on her PhD dissertation, ‘Memory, Myth and Material Culture: Visions of Empire in Postcolonial Germany’, which won the German Historical Institute London Dissertation Prize in 2010. The research was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council doctoral grant.

She is currently working on The Business of Decolonisation and 'Development': European Interventions in Global Industries 1945-1983, funded by an NWO Aspasia Grant. It considers the extent to which European private enterprise sought to influence Europe’s international relations to the ‘Third World’ during the political decolonisation process and beyond. This project analyses the role of individual businesses and their employees, as well as the institutional networks connecting them to government organisations and to each other. It takes a closer look at the international and intercultural encounters involved in a new era of investment in the Global South.

In 2021-22, Britta Schilling will hold a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS) to work on her book project, Beyond the Bungalow: An Entangled History of the Colonial Home in Africa, an exploration of British, German and French colonial living practices in sub-Saharan Africa between c. 1850 and 1960. Her research tests the extent to which imperial competition and national differences in the ideologies of colonial rule really influenced everyday life in sub-Saharan Africa. It does so through the lens of the colonial home, which it considers not just as a piece of material culture and architectural design, but also as a place of belonging and exclusion, and a space for everyday experience. The project analyses the colonial home as a ‘contact zone’ for European and non-European populations. Alongside archival evidence, some data for this project is being gathered through a crowdsourcing website which aims to provide an inclusive space to generate productive discussions about everyday life in the age of empire and colonial legacies today. Research for this project was also funded by a highly competitive Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship held at the University of Cambridge from 2012-2015.