Goebel's main research interests are the histories of nationalism, of migration, and of cities. Trained in the intellectual history of Latin America, his first book dealt with nationalism and the political use of history in twentieth-century Argentina.[7] However, his second book, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism, deals with the urban history of Paris as the “‘social bedrock’ for the formation of an anti-imperialist consciousness that transformed the world after 1945.”[8] The book won the 2016 Jerry Bentley Prize in World History, awarded by the American Historical Association.[9] Even though the book champions the benefits of “global history,” Goebel elsewhere warned that an “over-endearment with phenomena and historical explanations that cross national, and now regional, boundaries (…) can lead to unconvincing historical accounts, or narratives that drown questions of causality in a never-ending assemblage of sparkly anecdotes about ‘entanglement.’” [10]
