Research | with Dr. Barbara

I work with actors who want to go deeper — but don’t have time to waste.

I’m here to: (a) help you build your character’s backstory from real, forgotten sources and (b) use it to create a role that feels grounded, not improvised.

Start with these pieces.

Ready To Go Deeper Into The Role?

Get To Know Your Protagonist (1:1)

When you already know the role—and want to understand what your character carried, feared, or couldn’t say.

You’ve got the name. You’ve got the year. But you still don’t know how to walk into the room as this person. In this 1:1 intensive, I start building a custom research dossier just for you — not for an academic, not for school report, not for a fact-checker — but for you, the actor. The person carrying the weight of this role into the shoot. We’ll cover the first, few aspects of retracing their lives. Let’s find their fears, their tiny daily habits, their contradictions. And we’ll make them feel alive again. No fluff. No filler. Just what you need.

A Custom Research (1:1) — Done-For-You Or Done-With-You

You’re in between projects, and you know you should start preparing.
You don’t need yet another PDF — you need someone who can think like a historian and a scene partner. This is the work I do when everything’s on the line. This is a longterm collaboration. Let me spoonfeed you one strange, unforgettable piece of real history that makes everything click, one after the other. No academic lecture. No folder of useless files. Just what’s essential — and emotionally explosive. 👉 The first step? You tell me the time and setting. All conversations are confidential.

Here’s What Makes It Usable For You

I don’t just uncover history—I explain it in a way that helps you step into it. So when you’re in costume and the camera rolls, you’re not reciting facts. You’re carrying memory.

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Guten Tag, I’m Dr. Barbara from Germany. I was trained as a historian and archaeologist. Tracing people from the past, I’ve travelled across Europe and Japan to visit over 10,000 historical exhibitions, archaeological parks, memorials, and preserved historical homes. If someone needs to be found—a person, a place, a house destroyed in 1944 or rebuilt in 1883—I can find them. Not just in France, Italy, or England, but worldwide, in places like Samoa, Greenland, or Madeira—and especially for 1880s, 1900s, 1920s and Nazi Germany, or the German Democratic Republic (GDR). How? I read what others skip. I translate inventory lists, tax records, or bureaucratic forms into emotional realities: what your character hoped, feared, endured, or concealed.

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For clients from the UK, US, Australia and Europe, I’ve completed more than 130 research-based projects across historical exhibitions, books, and films. For every project, I browse at least 200 books—thanks to an eidetic memory and speedreading skills that let me take in more, faster. I’m deeply fluent in archival systems across Europe—from the Bundesarchiv to Nazi records, municipal inventories and family record books. 51 library cards and over 100 archive passes give me rapid access to records in places most people can’t reach. What I don’t yet know, I find out—through my network of over 400 researchers—including people who can decode 1920s German shorthand or speak 1100s Old English.

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It helps that I can decipher handwritten letters from 1200 to the present—including scripts most researchers can’t read. That opens up unpublished sources you’d never think to check. It also helps I’m fluent in both German and English, and can read most European languages, including French, Italian, Medieval Latin, and older variants like Gothic or Kanzleischrift. I work with unpublished and often sensitive materials—family archives, survivor testimonies, restricted estate documents—this means I carry a responsibility to handle each fragment with rigour and care. That discretion has earned me trust few others can claim.

Also, I see patterns most overlook: narrative fractures, emotional shifts, contradictions that hint at who someone was before they said it out loud. And I pass all of that to you—not as trivia, but as fuel. Because you deserve those details.

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I’m known for being able to translate academic or bureaucratic sources into emotionally usable insights. 

I don’t believe in emailing you tons of academic jargon and calling it »research.« Instead, I find the one document your character signed with shaking hands.

I also don’t offer »light prep.« That’s why I only work 1:1—because what we’re doing is too detailed, and too personal. 

Take what I uncover and translate it into choices you can use on set—while writing the backstory, in rehearsal, or in your internal prep.

So if you’re standing at the edge of a script set in another century—and you’re craving something deeper than what anyone else is offering?

I’ll help you find what they left behind.

And I’ll make sure none of it stays buried.

Notes For Actors Carrying The Past

This work is heavy. It should be.

But you shouldn’t have to carry it alone. Every month, I send a note — sometimes it’s a source. Sometimes it’s a question. Sometimes it’s just a reminder that emotion needs evidence, and you’re not failing if the prep you were handed feels thin. Sign up and I’ll send the first note. It starts with a photograph no one’s ever published — of a woman who survived something no script could ever describe.

All images: CC0, photographer Nicola Perscheid // Kathleen Ardelle 1921 // Syrie Wellcome via Wellcome Library London // Ziegfeld Girl in black.