German Historical Institute London Podcast

How was the hand to be guided, the eye to be trained, the senses sharpened in preparing the child for an adult world? In princely Mysore in southern India, the missionaries, who took the initial steps in opening up education to wider circles than those entitled to forms of knowledge, and the Government efforts that followed were faced with new and complex challenges in a society wracked by the pro...

Why was the Enlightenment a turning point in the way in which humans think about climate? In what way did climate catastrophes affect revolutions and vice versa? How did climate politics emerge during this time? In this GHIL podcast interview, Research Fellow for Colonial and Global History Mirjam Brusius and PR Officer Kim König, talk to Patrick Anthony about the research behind his GHIL lecture...

Some scholars and scientists identify the Enlightenment as an inflection point in the Anthropocene, a geological age in which humans act as a planetary force. My talk suggests that this inflection point was characterized not only by new means and scales of environmental exploitation, but also by the emergence of climate politics. The naturalist Georg Forster provides a helpful itinerary through th...

PR Officer Kim König and Research Fellow for Colonial and Global History Mirjam Brusius talk to Stefan Hanß about his research project which uses the scientific analysis and historical contextualization of the chemical fingerprints of Renaissance recipe users to offer a new understanding of material cultures, medicine, and the history of the body in early modern Germany.

The ‘material Renaissance’, historians have argued, was an age of experimentation, and recipes were at the heart of this cultural movement. New collaborations between the humanities and the sciences allow for novel insights into Renaissance recipe cultures, and more specifically the degree of material experimentation and engagement by ‘recipe practitioners’. Scientific analysis and thorough histor...

Talks from the Symposium at the launch event for Behind the Wire, an exhibition on Internment durinf the First World War, held at the German Historical Institute, April-June, 2023. During the First World War, German civilians were interned as ‘enemy aliens’ in British Empire locations around the world. British citizens, white and non-white, were interned in Ruhleben camp near Berlin as a retaliato...

How did people in the past understand globalism? GHIL Research Fellow for Modern History Pascale Siegrist and PR Officer Kim König speak with David Kuchenbuch about his research on American designer R. Buckminster Fuller and the (West) German historian Arno Peters. David Kuchenbuch argues that their work as ‘Welt-Bildner’ (makers of worlds) points us to important shifts in twentieth-century politi...

Many scholars have argued that historical concepts of the global are under-researched. In my talk, I will argue that filling this gap will mean taking a closer look at media representing global connections and differences. I will do this by presenting my research on American designer R. Buckminster Fuller and (West) German historian Arno Peters, both of whom rose to prominence as mediators of the...

What is the employment contract? When was it introduced in India? What is the role of Indian labour history within the field of labour history and historical research more generally? GHIL Senior Fellow and Head of the India Research Programme Indra Sengupta and PR Officer Kim König put these questions to Prabhu Mohapatra (University of Delhi) and talk to him about his research on the genealogy of...

When was the employment contract introduced in India? The story of the forging of the Formal Employment Contract in the first decades of the twentieth century, of its tortuous career and eventual dismantling over the next hundred years, may give us a clue to the persistent paradoxes of India’s labouring landscape. My presentation will examine how the employment contract came into being in India, a...

How have people experienced emotions in the past and how did their meanings differ from how we experience emotions today? What influence did emotions have on history? GHIL Research Fellow for Modern History Ole Münch and PR Officer Kim König talk to Ute Frevert, the new president of the Max Weber Foundation, about the research behind her lecture on ‘The Power of Emotions in German History’.

Everyone knows from experience that emotions are powerful: they motivate us to act in a certain way, they colour our experiences and shape our memories. But what impact do they have on history? What do we learn about history from looking through the lens of emotions? And what do we learn about emotions by applying a historical perspective? The talk explores those questions with regard to Germany i...

GHIL Research Fellow for Colonial and Global History Mirjam Brusius and PR Officer Kim König speak to Carsten Jahnke (Copenhagen) about his research on the history of the Hanseatic League and how historians have used it to shape Germans’ historical understanding.

Today, the Hanseatic League is anchored in the general consciousness of Germans as the ‘secret superpower’. Around 1800, however, the Göttingen professor Sartorius chose it as the subject of a major work because he could find nothing more irrelevant than this ‘half-forgotten antique’. How could a half-forgotten antique become a superpower? The lecture will trace the mnemonic strategies which were...

GHIL Research Fellow for Modern History Ole Münch talks to Martina Steber, Deputy Director of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ), about her research on the British composer, conductor, and music entrepreneur John Rutter, Popular Classical Music, and Transnational Conservatism since the 1970s.

It has gone largely unnoticed by musicologists and historians that the British composer, conductor, and music entrepreneur John Rutter has become a leading figure in popular music since the 1980s. Successful on the global music market, popular in the English-speaking world, and regularly topping the classical music charts with his Christmas carol compositions, Rutter embodies the opposite of comme...

GHIL Research Fellow for Modern History Ole Münch and PR and Events Officer Kim König speak to photographer Maria Cardamone. Maria has curated an exhibition which is currently on display at the GHIL and which is organised in cooperation with the Prize Papers Project. The Project is part of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Göttingen. It’s based at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and...

There is a disconnection between, on the one hand, Europe regarding colonial history as ‘the past’ and of little consequence to its contemporary self-understanding and, on the other hand, formerly colonized countries and populations living with the ongoing legacies of that colonial past as a present reality. In this lecture, I argue for a decolonial project for Europe. This is a project that would...

It is said that to be human is to be flawed, limited, and finite; however, the meaning of ‘flawed’ has changed over time. The lecture argues that in the nineteenth century a new conceptual framework for human deficiency emerged that compares humans with technology. This concept became ubiquitous in the twentieth century and still determines discourses on technology today. Unlike philosophical and...

In this lecture, Christina Morina discusses the political culture of the ‘Berlin Republic’, which has its roots as much in the era of German division as in the transformative years around 1989. Yet it is much more than a story of the convergence of triumphant (West German) democracy and failed (East German) dictatorship. Her project explores the ways in which ordinary citizens in East and West und...

The exhibition Forms, Voices, Networks explores the intersections between the growth of mass media and women’s rights movements in a transnational context during the 20th century. Centred on the histories of feminisms and the media in Britain, Germany and India, it draws attention to little-known or unheard voices and stories and draws connections between activists and the media across time and sp...

King Frederick II of Prussia enjoys the reputation of a philosopher king and a major author in his own right. But integral to that reputation is his chequered relationship with an increasingly energetic and volatile eighteenth-century public sphere. This joint lecture explores two key episodes in this history.

Recently, there has been an uptick of interest in the late Reinhart Koselleck’s theoretical writings. Whenever scholars across the humanities deal with issues of temporality, with present pasts or past futures, Koselleck’s work is invoked. Yet new histories of fascist and Nazi times oddly omit one of Koselleck’s most incisive essays, ‘Terror and Dream’. This talk will explore Koselleck’s thinking...

First, Elizabeth Hunter discusses tales of wonderful sleepers in seventeenth-century England, who slept for unusual periods of time or sleepwalked and did strange or terrible things. How were these tales understood and what did people at this time think of sleep? In the second half, Hannah Ahlheim talks about sleep and dreaming in the 24/7 society of the twentieth century. How does a modern societ...

The Quest for a New World Order: International Politics Between Visions of Global Governance and Catastrophic Failures in the 1990s - Fabian Klose (Cologne) In this recording of a lecture given in November 2021, Fabian Klose discusses the 1990s as a period marked by a quest for a new world order. He investigates the resulting bright new visions of global governance, and their accompanying failures...