New Approaches to the History of Adoption

Workshop
Venue: German Historical Institute London
Convenor: Benedikt Stuchtey

Workshop programme (PDF file)

German Society in the Nazi Era. ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ between Ideological Projection and Social Practice

International Conference organized by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte München-Berlin and the German Historical Institute London

Venue: German Historical Institute London

Convenors: Horst Möller (IfZ), Andreas Gestrich (GHIL), Bernhard Gotto (IfZ), Martina Steber (GHIL)

One of the most striking changes of perspective in recent research on National Socialism is the new interest which younger historians in particular are taking in German society during the Nazi period. Adopting questions, theories, and methods derived from the cultural turn, they are examining the social foundations of the Nazi dictatorship in order to explain the regime’s structure and its system of rule. The term Volksgemeinschaft, which has increasingly been used as the starting point from which to characterize Nazi society, can help to define both the visionary dimension of Nazi social policy, and its integrative and exclusive aspects. This change in perspective can be observed in Britain as well as Germany. It is noticeable that the social history approaches which shaped the discussion from the end of the 1970s to the middle of the 1980s rarely serve as reference points for the new research on Nazi society. Categories such as class or social inequality no longer play a large part in recent studies, not even in Britain, where they were the subject of especially close investigation.

The conference ‘German Society in the Nazi Era: Volksgemeinschaft between Ideological Projection and Social Practice’, co-organized by the German Historical Institute London and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte München-Berlin, will address these new approaches, but emphasize their social history dimension. It is mainly interested in the social consequences of social practice inspired by the notion of the Volksgemeinschaft. It will systematically investigate the functional mechanisms and characteristics of society in the Nazi Altreich, while incorporating the enormous dynamic for change which was inherent in the Nazi regime and casting light on processes of social change from the Weimar Republic to the immediate post-war period.

Conference programme (PDF file)

From Space to Place: the Spatial Dimension in History of Western Europe

A two-day international and interdisciplinary conference, organised by the Centre for Research in History and Theory, Roehampton University

Venue: German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NJ

This conference will explore the so-called `spatial turn in history' discussed among historians for the last decade or so and inspired by earlier anthropological ideas and the interdisciplinary approach by sociologists, especially geographers. It challenges the idea of place or space in history as an unreflected essentialist category linked to tradition and immutability. Instead, space as place is shown to be socially and culturally constructed, mediated and contested. Organised into three separate but interlinking topics (social space, workplace and intimate space) papers will investigate how specific spaces in the past not only evoked but conveyed political, social, cultural and symbolic meaning and conversely how particular spaces/places influenced this meaning.

Conference poster (PDF file)
Conference programme (PDF file)
Conference registration form (PDF file)

Transcending Boundaries: Biographical Research in Colonial and Postcolonial African History

Venue: German Historical Institute London
Convenors: Silke Strickrodt (GHIL) and Achim von Oppen (Universität Bayreuth)

In this workshop, we examine the opportunities offered by biographical research to produce a new approach to Africa’s colonial and postcolonial history. Careers and life stories of individuals and generations show particularly clearly the disruptions and constraints that were caused by colonial and postcolonial rule and the boundaries imposed by it. At the same time, life stories show how in everyday life these boundaries became porous or fluid, even producing new mobilities and continuities that transcended them, and how in this field new individual and collective identities were formed. This applies to politico-spatial boundaries of all kinds, which particularly in Africa conflict with deeply rooted mobilities that have always transcended even the boundaries of the continent in all directions. However, it also applies to borderlines between social and cultural spaces and, not least, to the delineations of historical periods, which in colonial and postcolonial contexts were often given a mythologising absoluteness (pre-colonial/colonial/postcolonial, traditional/modern, etc).

Call for Papers (PDF file)

German History Society Annual Conference

Venue: University of Manchester

Call for Papers (PDF file)

Commercial Agriculture in Africa as an Alternative to the Slave Trade

Venue: German Historical Institute London
Conveners: Robin Law (Liverpool University/Stirling University), Suzanne Schwarz (Liverpool Hope University), Silke Strickrodt (GHIL)

By the mid nineteenth century the view that ‘legitimate’ commerce, especially the export of agricultural produce, would help to eradicate the Atlantic slave trade and bring mutual benefits to Britain and Africa had become a central tenet of mainstream abolitionist thought. As A. G. Hopkins has suggested, the attempt to establish export agriculture in Africa was part of British efforts to reform the international economic order after 1815 and represented ‘Britain’s first development plan for Africa’. Recent scholarly literature has explored the impact of the development of legitimate forms of trade on African economy and society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Comparatively little attention has been given, however, to earlier attempts to develop commercial crop cultivation and alternative forms of trade with Africa. By focusing on the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, this conference will explore the ways in which different interest groups and individuals attempted to exploit the natural resources of Africa through diverse agricultural and trading systems.

Call for Papers (PDF file)

Civility and its Other. German, British, South Asian and African Perspectives, 17th – 19th centuries

Conference organized by the German Historical Institute London and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin

Venue: German Historical Institute London

Convenors: Andreas Gestrich (GHIL), Ute Frevert and Margrit Pernau (Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin)

Conference programme (PDF file)

Crime and Punishment in Modern Europe, 1870-1990

International Conference organised by the German Historical Institutes in Washington and London

Venue: German Historical Institute Washington

Conveners: Richard F. Wetzell (GHI Washington), Kerstin Brückweh (GHIL)

The German Historical Institutes in Washington and London are organizing an international conference on the history of criminal justice in modern Europe from 1870 to 1990. The conference will take place in Washington DC from March10 to 12, 2011. The meeting is designed to take stock of recent and current research in this burgeoning field and to facilitate conversation between historians working on different countries in order to provide a comparative perspective on European developments. For this purpose, the conveners are soliciting proposals for papers presenting historical research on the legal, political, cultural, and social history of criminal justice.

Call for Papers (Deadline: 28 February 2010)

The Dilemmas of International Humanitarian Aid in the Twentieth Century

Venue: German Historical Institute London

The German Historical Institute and the Department of International History at the London School of Economics are organizing a conference on the history of humanitarian aid in the twentieth century. The proceedings form part of the Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship established at LSE and GHIL.

Convenor: Prof. Dr. Johannes Paulmann, Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor 2009-10 (LSE International History Department & German Historical Institute London)

Call for Papers (PDF file)