Paul Götz
Position
Doctoral candidate in sociology at the Soziologisches Institut, Universität Zürich, since September 2025, under the lead of Prof. Dr. Jörg Rössel.
Research
Economic history, the social and cultural history of consumption, and digital humanities. Secondary: long-run inequality; the role of artificial intelligence in social-science research. Methods combine applied econometrics with text-as-data and a cliometric source criticism that treats historical corpora as structured data without forgetting that they are artefacts with a provenance.
Current work
Dissertation: From Recipes to Markets: Luxury Foods, Culinary Print, and Consumer Preferences in Europe, 1500–1900.
Publications:
- –Processing the Past: A Simple LLM-Driven Framework for Digitizing Historical Sources and Structuring their Content.Journal of Interdisciplinary History, forthcoming.
- –Cheap Data, Scarce Ideas? Historical Social Science in the Era of Large Language Models.Paul Götz, Erik Ahlborn, Sinem Ilseven, and Malte DoehneManagement Revue – Socio-Economic Studies, forthcoming.
Working papers and preprints:
- –300 Years of Housing Wealth Mobility: The City-State of Basel, 1500–1800.Jonas M. Geweke, Niccolò G. Armandola, and Paul GötzEHES Working Paper No. 312, 2026.
- –Agents in the Archive: Does an Agentic Loop Improve LLM Transcription and Extraction of Historical Print?SocArXiv preprint, forthcoming.
- –What’s for Dinner? Culinary Print and the Transformation of European Taste, 1500–1900.Working paper; job market paper.
Work in progress:
- –Fragrant Riches: The Demand for Spices in the Netherlands, 1600–1813.Developed from the M.A. thesis.
Research data
European Culinary Bibliographic Dataset. 17,899 entries for c. 1500–1900 from fourteen bibliographies, harmonised across six languages and geocoded to the city level.
European Historical Recipe Corpus. About 197,000 structured recipes from 443 cookery and household books in a shared JSON schema, 1500–1899.
Michelin Guide Dataset. Restaurant names, locations, and star ratings as a panel, c. 1975–2019.
Open-source tools
ChronoDownloader. Bulk retrieval from fourteen-plus digital libraries with IIIF and fuzzy matching.
ChronoTranscriber. PDF, EPUB and image transcription via Tesseract or multi-provider vision LLMs.
ChronoMiner. Schema-driven structured extraction with token-based chunking.
Mabillon. Agentic transcription and schema-validated extraction, built on the pi agent harness.
AutoExcerpter. LangChain summarisation with OpenAlex-enriched citations.
Talks
2026 DecDi chi è la tradizione? — Secondo Convegno ARiSE, Naples (forthcoming).
2026 SepWhat’s for Dinner? — Workshop on Pre-Industrial Economic History, Universität Bonn.
2026 JulWhat’s for Dinner? — International Schumpeter Society Conference, Strasbourg.
2026 FebWhat’s for Dinner? — Research Colloquium, Seminar für Mittlere und Neuere Geschichte, Universität Göttingen.
2025 DecWhat’s for Dinner? — Research Colloquium, Seminar für Neuere Geschichte, Universität Tübingen.
2025 NovWhat’s for Dinner? — Social Science History Association, Chicago.
2025 NovWhat’s for Dinner? — Preindustrial Economic History Workshop, Universität Bamberg.
2025 SepNetworks of Taste — OMTF Conference, Lugano.
2025 JulWhat’s for Dinner? — World Economic History Conference, Lund.
2025 MarWhat’s for Dinner? — HUMM International PhD Conference, University of Tallinn.
2025 MarWhat’s for Dinner? — PhD Workshop in Economic History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Teaching
2025–Techniken wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens (lecture since 2026–27); Globalisierung; Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft; M.A. thesis supervision. Universität Zürich.
2023–25Five B.A. seminars and tutorials in economic and social history; B.A. thesis supervision. Universität Göttingen.
Workshops on AI in research
Short, practical workshops for doctoral researchers and faculty on using AI well in scholarly work: everyday chatbot workflows and agentic coding for research software, with a grounded view of the risks. Materials on request.
2026 SepAI Agents for Social Science Research — one-day workshop with Nico Mutzner, Soziologisches Institut, Universität Zürich. Materials.
2026 MarKI in den Geisteswissenschaften: Grundlagen, sichere Nutzung und praktische Anwendungen — Graduiertenschule für Geisteswissenschaften, Universität Göttingen.
Education
2025–Doctoral candidate in sociology, Universität Zürich.
2023–25Doctoral candidate in economic and social history, Universität Göttingen.
2019–23M.A., Economic and Social History, Universität Göttingen. Thesis, Fragrant Riches.
2014–18B.A., Economics and Social Sciences, FU Bozen. Trilingual DE / IT / EN.
Positions
2025–Research and Teaching Associate (Assistierender), Soziologisches Institut, Universität Zürich.
2023–25Research and Teaching Associate (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter), Institut für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, Universität Göttingen. Coordinated the institute’s research colloquium throughout the post.
2021Student Research Assistant (Werkstudent), Empirica AG, Berlin — policy reports for the BAMF.
2015–18Private tutor alongside the B.A., Bozen.
Languages and tools
German (native), Italian (C1), English (C2, CAE grade A); reading French. Working with Python, pandas, spaCy, huggingface, the OpenAI Agents SDK, Stata and LaTeX.