German Historical Institute London Podcast

In this episode, Kim König and Thomas Kaal sit down with Ulrike Lindner, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cologne, to talk about the research behind her lecture on epistemic inequalities in the Global South and their role in reproducing social hierarchies. Drawing on archival work on the International Labour Organization and its discussions of so‑called “native labour” in the 1920s...

The lecture will first address the significance of epistemic inequalities in the Global South and work out why these are often prerequisites for the persistence of durable social inequalities. It will then analyse the International Labour Organization (ILO) and its treatment of colonial, non-white workers in the 1920s as an example of the consequences of epistemic inequalities. The ILO, founded in...

What difference can queer perspectives make in our understanding of the German past and in present-day conversations around sexual and gender diversity? Having taught and published on LGBT history for several years in Berlin, London, and other places, Benno Gammerl takes this opportunity to reflect on the impact of such work. Looking at experiences and struggles of same-sex loving and gender-nonco...

In this episode, host Kim König speaks with Benno Gammerl (European University Institute in Florence) about the research underlying his lecture on “Queering German history: Still a vital and viable endeavor?”. They explore what it means to “queer” history, both as a critical practice and as a methodological approach for rethinking established historical narratives. Benno Gammerl discusses why quee...

This lecture, with a focus on India, aims to understand this important archive of knowledge of the natural world collected and organised in the context of the empire in the light of recent historiography on botany and empire. It highlights the importance of creating an inventory and digitally repatriating botanical specimens held primarily in British institutions, and highlights efforts for cultur...

In this episode, GHIL Fellow for Medieval History Thomas Kaal and host Kim König talk with Henrike Lähnemann, Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics at the University of Oxford, about her recent GHIL lecture. They explore how Latin and German texts from around 500 years ago shaped the development of the German language and its cultural history, with examples ranging from nuns’ let...

The lecture will discuss how Latin and German texts written 500 years ago influenced the linguistic and historical development of early modern and modern Germany, looking at examples from nuns’ letters, Reformation pamphlets, and songs. This is part of a project to write a cultural history of Germany by developing a historical narrative which combines linguistic changes with political, social, and...

Current critical scholarship tends to cast the colonial West as the prime actor in shaping the non-Western world, ‘producing’ types of knowledge specific to itself and alien to others, ‘inventing’ not just tradition(s) but entire religions, and imposing boundaries premised on colonial knowledge and interest. The insight gained from this scholarship is deeply important. But it also carries the risk...

Chills, aches and hot flushes. What exactly were people describing when they complained of fever around 1800? In this episode, host Kim König and GHIL Research Fellow Pascale Siegrist talk to Stefanie Gänger, Professor of Modern History at Heidelberg University. They discuss the research behind her lecture on the history of fever and febrile diseases in the French, Iberian and British Empires from...

The talk is concerned with the history of fever and febrile diseases in the French, Iberian, and British empires, from the 1770s to the 1820s, a time when these were widely considered the most common and fatal diseases afflicting mankind. Emphasizing the historicity and cultural contingency of fever and the febrile experience, the presentation explores the concept of disease in the period in quest...

In this episode, host Kim König and Research Fellow Ole Münch are joined by Christiane Reinecke, Professor of Modern European History at the Europa-Universität Flensburg, to discuss her research on notions of urban problems in late 20th-century European cities. Drawing on Christiane’s GHIL lecture, they discuss the shift in urban policy discourse from class-based concerns to issues of migration, r...

In this episode, we talk about working-class communities. Or rather: ideas about the working-class, some of which are quite romanticised. Joining host Kim König and Research Fellow Ole Münch to discuss the topic of his GHIL lecture is Jon Lawrence, Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at the University of Exeter. Together, they explore how these ideas have influenced scholarly discourse an...

Jon Lawrence: Shifting Visions of Working-Class Community in Post-War Britain The idea that the British working class had its own distinctive way of life and culture can be traced back to at least the 1880s, but in the wake of the Second World War it became common to argue that urban working-class life was marked by dense networks of reciprocal social relationships and shared norms worthy of the t...

In this episode, host Kim König is joined by Ole Münch, Research Fellow for Modern History, and Achim Landwehr, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Konstanz. Together, they discuss the research behind Achim Landwehr's GHIL Lecture, which examined the constitutive role of voids in European early modernity. Their conversation moves from information-rich early modern calendars to t...

European cultures tend to overlook voids, or, at best, see them as unpleasant phenomena. Yet voids are not only unavoidable, but actually constitutive in the emergence of European-Western modernity over the last four hundred years—which might now be coming to an end, possibly due to the excessive production of voids. Although the meaning of emptiness was certainly not first conceived in the sevent...

The exhibition “The Horror Camps”, displayed in the Reading Room of the Daily Express in London from May 1945, featured enlarged photographs from the liberated Nazi camps. It prompted questions about the relationship between image and evidence, as well as the public use of degrading images, which remain profoundly relevant to this day. Janina Struk (independent scholar), Paul Betts (University of...

How do colonial-era racial theories continue to influence modern science in India? Today, we're exploring this question by examining new research which traces the transnational connections between Germany and colonial India in the field of racial science. In this podcast interview, host Kim König is joined by Indra Sengupta, Senior Fellow and Head of our India Research Programme. They speak with T...

How do we define a process? What types exist, and how does our understanding of them reflect our historical and cultural context? In this interview host Kim König and GHIL/UCL Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow Almuth Ebke (University of Mannheim) talk to Wolfgang Knöbl (Hamburg Institute for Social Research) about the research behind his GHIL lecture on (historical) processes. Their conversation explor...

Talk of ‘social processes’ is widespread in historiography as well as in the social sciences; process terms such as industrialization, urbanization, individualization, secularization, etc. are ubiquitous. Nevertheless, it is usually rather unclear what processes actually are, how they should be theorized, and what types of processes can be distinguished. The lecture will 1) pose the question of wh...

In this episode, host Kim König and Ole Münch, research fellow in modern history, talk to Professor Philipp Gassert, whose lecture at the German Historical Institute explored a compelling question: Why does street protests remain powerful in our digital age? Professor Gassert’s research examines 250 years of protest history in different societies and geographical contexts. His project aims to deve...

Even though we now live in an age of digital media, physical street protest is not a thing of the past. Anyone knows that even in the twenty-first century, public, symbolically charged spaces continue to be occupied by protesters who hope to score political points. We may even be under the impression that the frequency of street protests has increased. So why does ‘taking to the streets’ still wor...

Dhruv Raina's lecture explores the conceptual challenges of developing a comprehensive historiography of techniques and technology in a global context. The encounter between Europe and Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced several discourses on the non-Western/non-European worlds that played a formative role in the crystallization of the social science disciplines. Late twentiet...

Irreconcilability seems to define both global politics and societal dynamics today, leading to a growing focus on reconciliation processes. While political science has long established reconciliation as a key area of research, especially since the 1990s, historians have engaged with it far less. Despite its obvious relevance to their discipline, as calls for reconciliation are always rooted in the...

Whether in a global political context or within society, irreconcilability seems to be the hallmark of our present times. This explains the growing interest in reconciliation processes. Since the 1990s, ‘reconciliation’ has been an established field of research in political science. Historians, however, have explored this field only to a limited extent, although the topic should be an obvious one...

How do historical narratives and memories shape our understanding of national identity and collective memory? Lucy Noakes (University of Essex) and Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck) reflect on how the Second World War has shaped Germany and Britain after 1945. The conversation offers insights into the ways in which the two nations navigated the aftermath of the war and redefined their identities and role...