Moritz is a legal historian and labour law scholar who investigates the social categories of labour and race. He is currently exploring how these two categories were mobilised in early modern England and its colonies, which he regards as the zero-point of capitalist modernity. His doctoral project read the evolution of atypical work (esp. agency work) in the UK since the 1970s as an innovative way of sustaining labour fragmentation in a supposedly ‘post-racial’ society.

Moritz completed his PhD in Law at the University of Kent in 2021. Before joining SCRIPTS, he coordinated a working group on “The Future of Work After Covid” convened by the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German Academy of Science and Engineering. He spent the autumn quarter of 2024 at the University of Chicago, where he was hosted by Eric Santner.

• Long history of capitalist modernity
• Labour market categories
• Race as a social category
• Body analogies
• English Reformation
• Legal theory

Current Research projects at SCRIPTS

Moritz is currently engaging with debates on racial capitalism and the “transition to capitalism” through the lens of post-Reformation England and its early American colonies (c. 1530-1700). He seeks to trace, and make sense of, a peculiar shift in the English body politic during this period that generated a new, properly post-medieval social organism — namely, capitalist modernity.

• Allmendinger, J. and Neugebauer, M. (2022) ‘Wohin mit der Arbeit? Erwerb, Sorge, Bildung und ziviles Engagement – Jobs im Wandel’, BBAW- Jahresmagazin, pp. 12-15.
• Neugebauer, M. (2021) ‘Home-Working as a Space-Time Problem’, Futures of Work, 16 March.
• Neugebauer, M. (2020) ‘No, We Don’t Want a “War Economy” to Deal With the Pandemic’, Jacobin, 17 May.
• Neugebauer, M. (2020) ‘A Corona Utopia in Three Parts’, Critical Legal Thinking, 25 March.
• Neugebauer, M. (2016) ‘After Germany’s Super Sunday’, Open Democracy, 21 March.