 In 1759 he was appointed professor of history at the University of Göttingen, where he remained for the next forty years.Gatterer was a pioneer of "universal history", and with fellow Göttingen historian August Ludwig von Schlözer (1735–1809), he was instrumental in developing a modern, hermeneutical approach to history.He believed that historical events needed to be systematically arranged by describing their causal relationships, rather than simply providing a chronology of events.