GHIL Blog

12 December 2024

Blogpost

Leonie Wolters

Human Interest in the Global South: The Gemini News Service (1967-2002)

Much of what counted as world news came from cities and relied on male voices from the Global North, so a more balanced world required an increase in reports about—and by—groups that had been left out of focus: women and people in the Global South, especially its villages…

Category: GHIL Fellows, Research

28 November 2024

Blogpost

William King

(De)Constructing Europe? Some Findings . . .

Bringing together nine researchers based in Hamburg, London, Rome, and Warsaw, the (De)Constructing Europe project (also known as the ‘Euroscepticism project’), sought to view the history of European integration through different lenses.

Category: GHIL Fellows, Research

14 November 2024

Blogpost

Damiana Salm

‘Fuel Poverty’ and the Crisis of Welfare in Britain, 1970s–1980s

When former and present tenants of Hulme Crescents, a social housing estate in Manchester, were asked in 1990 to write down their thoughts on the estate as part of the Hulme Views Project, their recollections varied….

Category: Research, Scholarships

31 October 2024

Blogpost

Olivia Mayer

‘Alionor Cobhame conspyryd the kynges deth’: The Magic Trial of Eleanor Cobham, 1441

For Eleanor Cobham—Duchess of Gloucester and wife of King Henry VI’s brother—the accusation of magic against her in July 1441 came as a complete surprise. Four of her personal astrologers and nigromancers (magicians who perform magic with the help of demons) and the witch Margery Jourdemayne were also imprisoned for practising magic against the king…

Category: Research, Scholarships

10 October 2024

Blogpost

Catharina Hänsel

‘The problem is organising time, not work.’ : Exploring Working Time Regulations and the Determination of ‘Scientific Wages’ in Ahmedabad through the Archives of the Wellcome Collection, London

How do we organize working time? This question has repeatedly come to the fore, particularly at historical junctures of technological change. Following the Second World War, countries in both the Global North and South sought to find new answers to problems of human–machine interactions. The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations’ studies on sociotechnical systems have recently attracted renewed attention…

Category: Research, Scholarships

2 September 2024

Blogpost

Flemming Falz

‘Consider Margaret Thatcher’s premiership as ground zero for the mess we are in now.’ The British Housing Crisis in Non-Fiction

The UK is in the midst of a housing crisis that is causing hardship for millions of Britons. Over the past few years, the worsening situation has been reflected in the market for non-fiction books. In a small bookshop in north London, I counted more than half a dozen new titles dealing with the housing crisis —and a more systematic search brings the number up to at least fifteen published in the last five years.…

Category: Research, Scholarships

15 July 2024

Blogpost

Josefine Langer Shohat

Too German for Holocaust Research? Alfred Wiener and Louis de Jong on the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 1952

In October 1952, Alfred Wiener and Louis de Jong compared notes on the still relatively new Institute for Contemporary History in Munich (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, IfZ), wondering whether its staff members would be capable of conducting research on National Socialism…

Category: Research, Scholarships

1 July 2024

Blogpost

Kay Schmücking

Britain’s View of the German Cult of the Dead: A Media History Perspective

In September 1943, at a time when the Second World War was turning into a military debacle for the German Wehrmacht, the Leicester Evening Mail published an article entitled ‘The New German Valhalla: Nazis’ Pagan Cult of Death’. In it, the author analysed the current state of German wartime society and focused in particular on the central importance of the cult of death in German warfare…

Category: Research, Scholarships

17 June 2024

Blogpost

Felicitas Remer

‘Political Balance’ or ‘Natural Growth’? The British Mandate, Meir Dizengoff, and the Struggle over Tel Aviv Port in the 1920s and 1930s

On 24 February 1938, a crowd of 30,000 onlookers gathered in the rain awaiting the official opening of Tel Aviv port to passenger traffic. […] The city’s port had been a project long in the making, and it held great significance not only for Tel Aviv, but for the Zionist project as a whole…

Category: Research, Scholarships

3 June 2024

Blogpost

Stephan Bruhn

Social Inequality: Early Medieval Perspectives on a Modern-Day Challenge

Social inequalities are among the most pressing challenges facing us today. Yet they also affected the past in many different ways. Investigating historical inequalities can sharpen our understanding of present-day phenomena. This is true even of an era whose social order no longer exists: the Middle Ages…

Category: GHIL Fellows, Research

15 May 2024

Blogpost

Ana Carolina Schveitzer

Visualizing Labour in German East Africa: Photographic Images and their Circulation

With the support of a GHIL scholarship, I had the opportunity to visit Cambridge University Library in February of 2023 and explore its special collections. As a historian who analyses photographs from the former German colonies in Africa, I was intrigued by one particular box—number 4—labelled ‘German East Africa’ (modern-day Tanzania) with the date range 1910–39…

Category: Research, Scholarships

1 May 2024

Blogpost

Mirjam Brusius

Museums Under Construction: On Loss, Disorder, Destruction, and Objects in Storerooms

Archaeological artefacts from the Ottoman Empire have only recently attracted attention in current debates over decolonization and restitution. Mirjam S. Brusius of the German Historical Institute London is researching the excavation of objects, the role of the local population, and why certain items have languished for decades in the storerooms of European museums.

Category: GHIL Fellows, Research

15 April 2024

Blogpost

Elisa Heuser

The Welsh Fasting Girl: A Morbid Spectacle

The story of Sarah Jacob is a tragic one. On 17 December 1869, when she was not yet 13 years old, she died of starvation. There was no shortage of food or unwillingness to provide her with food, had she asked for it. Her family, trained nurses, and male doctors were around her when she passed away, but they all quite literally watched her die…

Category: Research, Scholarships

28 March 2024

Blogpost

Sarah Maria Noske

‘No Shows’ and Other Forms of Refusal: Reading Missionary Letters about the Loyalty Islands

As part of my PhD study, I am investigating and tracing the history of the island communities of the Ruapuke Mission Station in the Foveaux Strait in southern New Zealand and of the Loyalty Islands north-east of New Caledonia. […] I am interested in how these communities and their lives changed in the context of the mission stations that were established on the islands, and how colonialism was negotiated in these gaps of the ‘webs of empire’.

Category: Research, Scholarships

29 February 2024

Blogpost

Janis Meder

Competition between Profit and Principles: The ‘Natural’ Market Niche in 1980s Britain

Today, a growing number of commercial companies across a variety of industries emphasize their moral motivations for business. […] This leads to an entanglement of moral and political messages with consumption, enabling the consumer to acquire not only a certain object or service, but also the moral implication that comes with it.

Category: Research, Scholarships

24 January 2024

Blogpost

Maxine Hart

The German Naval Memorial in Laboe

The German Naval Memorial in Laboe, a coastal town in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, is dedicated to those who have lost their lives at sea. It was first envisioned as a national memorial to German sailors who were killed in the line of duty during the First World War…

Category: Research

21 December 2023

Blogpost

James Krull

Trial and Error: The Federal Republic of Germany’s Failed First National Day of Remembrance and Where to Go from There

This awkward and little-known sidenote of history is an ideal starting point for further research. It shows that (national) days of remembrance and those of celebration are not necessarily as easily or precisely differentiated from one another as one might think. It exemplifies the role that national days of remembrance play on the political stage and in discourses of identity related to the past: they are by no means a stable, rigid medium but on the contrary are subject to frequent change.

Category: Publications

23 November 2023

Blogpost

Christopher Dillon & Kim Wünschmann

The German Revolution of 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses

Only by exploring the contemporary archival record, on which all the contributions to the volume rest, can historians excavate the revolution’s popular mobilization and societal penetration, its destruction of inherited patterns of authority, and its complex and contested legacy for the Weimar republican project.

Category: Publications

9 November 2023

Blogpost

Lea Levenhagen

A Short Walk through London’s History during the Second World War: Financial Experts in Exile

A portrait of London emerges as the bedrock for the future economic integration of Europe—a ‘wonderful opportunity’ to make the most of the situation of exile during the Second World War. This formative period is at the heart of my Ph.D. project and its analysis of the international groups, informal gatherings, and committees involved in generating ideas for a post-war European order. …

Category: Research, Scholarships

10 October 2023

Blogpost

Maximilian Rose

Philip Quaque in Cape Coast 1766–1816

“[S]tyling himself as an orthodox Anglican who was fighting to preserve and enlarge an embattled local Christian community [...], this framing seems to have prevented him from making meaningful connections with many of the Fante of Cape Coast, but it also never allowed him to fulfil the expectations of European correspondents, who could not refrain from casting Quaque as a ‘native’”.

Category: Research, Scholarships

28 September 2023

Blogpost

Kim Embrey

Sing a Line with Coca Wine: The European Rediscovery of Coca

Understanding the mechanisms of the introduction of coca into British society, the trajectory of its career, and ultimately the development of global  restrictions on the drug, can support historians in drawing comparisons with other narcotics that might have experienced a similar fate.

Category: Research, Scholarships

12 September 2023

Blogpost

Philipp Molderings

The Postcolonial Nation in the Museum: World Appropriation and National Identity at the Humboldt Forum and British Museum

The combination and juxtaposition of the historical and contemporary time levels is intended to give a deeper historical dimension to the problems that have penetrated the public sphere in the course of the colonialism debates since 2015, and in this way enable a more differentiated understanding of how the two museums are currently renegotiating collective identity and memory culture between national and global perspectives. …

Category: Research, Scholarships

3 August 2023

Blogpost

Annika Stendebach

All Along the Peace Walls – Revisiting 1960s and 1970s Belfast

"This research is part of my Ph.D. project with the working title ‘Not our Place?’, which focuses on the leisure behaviour of youth on the island of Ireland between 1958 and 1983. Because I am investigating not only how young people negotiated relationships between genders and generations, but also the social spaces in which those relationships operated, what we planned for the day was not a regular interview but a walking one."

Category: Research, Scholarships

11 July 2023

Blogpost

Frieda Ottmann

A View of Europe through the Prism of the Rhine

"Researching the Rhine [...] reveals how politicians and the public filled different understandings of Europe with meaning, and how they addressed broader questions of European integration within the frame of controversies over water and the environment. The course of the river, along with up- and downstream relations and political interests, structured transnational European interactions."

Category: Research, Scholarships

29 June 2023

Blogpost

Almuth Ebke

Essays and Reviews: The ‘Greatest Religious Crisis of the Victorian Age’?

The controversy over the historicity of the Bible thus cannot be understood without considering the political history of the time. This history, however, was shaped by a broader intellectual shift: theological boundaries were redrawn as the place of religion was renegotiated, with church actors increasingly subject to state restrictions. …

Category: Research, Scholarships

13 June 2023

Blogpost

Beatrice Blümer

Studia humanitatis in Text and Image: The Liber insularum Archipelagi by Cristoforo Buondelmonti

"[E]ach manuscript offers a subjective cultural, political, and social conception of the Mediterranean. Successive illuminators and scribes did not just present a view of the Aegean archipelago; instead, they revealed part of their habits and structures of thought with every formative decision they made in each manuscript. The copyists were influenced by multiple factors, such as their educational background or the reason for the copy being produced—whether patronage or otherwise—and this resulted in compositional diversity across the corpus of copies."

Category: Research, Scholarships

16 May 2023

Blogpost

Daniela Roberts

Creating Space and Collection Display in British Gothic Revival Houses (1740–1860)

"I aim to uncover neo-Gothic concepts of space, the historiographic adaptation of medieval architecture, the diversity of Gothic and neoclassical designs, and their role as political and social signifiers. My project will analyse Gothic revival as an architectural framework for collection display for the first time, in order to understand the development of specific modes of presentation in the context of collection-related domestic architecture and the evolution of the modern collection space."

Category: Research, Scholarships

13 April 2023

Blogpost

Dorothea McEwan

Eduard Zander in Ethiopia, 1847–68

What makes Zander’s oeuvre so special is the fact that he was a trained artist, painter, and draughtsman who, as a resident in Ethiopia from 1847 to his death in 1868, looked at Ethiopia not as an exotic place, but as his home. …

Category: Publications

28 March 2023

Blogpost

Dorothea McEwan

Studies on Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl, and Gertrud Bing

"[T]he collection in the Warburg Institute allowed for an in-depth examination and understanding of Aby Warburg [...] and his two librarians, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing. Saxl and Bing were instrumental in transferring the entire library to London in 1933, and became directors of the newly established Warburg Institute there and developing it into one of the world’s leading centres of intellectual history [...]."

Category: Publications

9 March 2023

Blogpost

Ole Merkel

Socialism and Slavery within the British and German Socialist Labour Movements, 1830–1890

"The aim of my thesis is therefore not only to examine the attitudes of British and German socialists to classical colonial slavery, as might initially be assumed, but also to explore [...] how and why the socialist labour movements in Britain and the German states, or the German Empire, used the topos of slavery in the period 1830–90. [...] for different purposes when denouncing the ‘domination of man over man’ (to echo a socialist slogan)."

Category: Research, Scholarships

16 February 2023

Blogpost

Jonas Bechtold

The Emperor’s Diet or the Empire’s Reichstag? Sixteenth-Century English Wordplay on the ‘Diet’ and its Heuristic Use

[T]he distinction between different forms of Imperial assembly was in fact more present to those who produced sources in the sixteenth century than to the nineteenth-century editors. This discovery underscores the importance of working with primary sources [...] for anyone working with the Calendars or similar editions that can obscure rather than reveal the diversity of the sources. …

Category: Research, Scholarships

26 January 2023

Blogpost

Louisa-Dorothea Gehrke

Botany in Time and Space: The Chelsea Physic Garden

If anything seems to linger from the eighteenth century, it is neither the fragile and often short-lived plants nor the ghosts of the botanists that tended them, but the traces of natural historians and horticultural practitioners in manuscripts, herbaria, and gardens themselves. …

Category: Research, Scholarships

11 January 2023

Blogpost

Martin Kristoffer Hamre

Promoting German Nazism in the Heart of the British Empire: The London Congress of the ‘Nationalist International’ in July 1935

"[T]he London Congress also revealed inconsistencies and disagreements among British and other European nationalists, in particular concerning the role attributed to the League of Nations, illustrating the difficulties in forming any effective ‘International of nationalists’." …

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Category: Research, Scholarships

15 December 2022

Blogpost

Stephan Bruhn & Marcus Meer

Conference Report: The Politics of Iconoclasm in the Middle Ages, 1–2 September 2022

Image-making ages always appear to be image-breaking ones as well, as Len Scales (Durham) stressed in his welcome and introduction, referring to current instances of overtly political attacks on images. As such, we would expect the Middle Ages, as a decidedly visual age, to be no different. Yet existing scholarship, Scales continued, suggests that image-breaking was alien to the medieval period …

Category: Events

22 November 2022

Blogpost

Haureh Hussein

Māori Iwi, Quaker Whalers, and Missionaries at the Bay of Islands in Aotearoa/New Zealand (1790–1840)

Among the many records of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) held in the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham are minutes of a meeting of the CMS committee in London. At this meeting on 9 August 1819 the committee learned from a letter sent by the missionary Thomas Kendall that several whaling captains who had anchored in the Bay of Islands in Aotearoa/New Zealand ‘had been very kind to him and his colleagues’. The ‘Officers of the above ships’, Kendall continued, ‘conducted …

Category: Research, Scholarships

3 November 2022

Blogpost

Katharina Breidenbach

Pastors, Commissaries, Diplomats: Agency and Migration Networks in the Early Modern Period

Confessional migrations, especially Protestant ones, are a defining characteristic of the early modern period.1 Well-known examples include the Huguenots and the Vaudois in the 1690s, the Palatines in 1708, and the Salzburgers in the 1730s. Most of these migrations were structured by networks involving migrants, diplomats, agents, states, and institutions; and just as importantly, money flows, publications, and escape routes. Overall, these migration networks can be seen as power constellations in which diplomats, agents, institutions and state actors were interconnected and influenced each other. …

Category: Research, Scholarships

28 September 2022

Blogpost

Levke Harders and Falko Schnicke

Borders and Belonging: Subjects of Current and Historical Significance

Borders and belonging are of immense importance as borders are being (re)defined, strengthened, or weakened all around the globe. Brexit, the proposed wall between the USA and Mexico, the India–Pakistan border—the drawing of social and spatial boundaries is at the heart of many current debates, as is the question of what it means to ‘belong’ somewhere. The featured image illustrates how important the relationship between borders and belonging is and, from the point of view of those involved, how relevant to security considerations...

Category: Publications

8 September 2022

Blogpost

Christina Bröker

Anger, Astonishment, and other Reactions: A Medieval King’s Emotional Behaviour

"[A]s though he [Henry III] was infected by fury, being unable to contain his anger, he raised his voice in uproar, and ran furiously away from all who were in his chamber."
Medieval kings such as Henry III (r. 1216–72) are regularly described in chronicles as angry—especially when challenged—and they often expressed their anger in excessive gestures. This particular passage was written by Matthew Paris, a monastic chronicler famous for not holding back his opinion on either kings or popes…

Category: Research, Scholarships

28 July 2022

Blogpost

Marcus Meer

Conference Report: Workshop on Medieval Germany, 6 May 2022

After many months of online-only conferences, one of the first in-person events to take place at the GHIL saw thirteen scholars gather at the beginning of May 2022 for a densely packed day of discussion dedicated to medieval history. What united participants at this workshop—and its previous iterations—was their special interest in the German-speaking lands of the Middle Ages. Encouragingly, the list of participants’ home institutions shows that this interest is far from restricted to scholars based in Germany...

Category: Events

14 July 2022

Blogpost

Lukas Herde

‘Enjoy your bodies!’: Writing the History of Sexuality in Later Life through 1980s British Television

At 15:45 on 11 February 1986, Channel 4’s programme for the elderly Years Ahead turned to sex. This special Valentine’s Day edition conceded that society was oblivious to intimate desire in later life. And yet, change was on the horizon. Marjorie Proops, co-host of that episode, stated that ‘attitudes are changing’, and so Years Ahead set out to guide even more seniors towards ‘sexual freedom’ …

Category: Research, Scholarships

23 June 2022

Blogpost

Christian Schuster

British Migrants in the Kingdom of Saxony and Saxons in London, c.1850–1914

It may seem counter-intuitive that, three months after the outbreak of the First World War, British people were allowed to walk completely free through the streets of Dresden. But a look at the history of the British community in Saxony shows that there had been a special relationship between British migrants and the Saxon locals long before this conflict…

Category: Research, Scholarships

9 June 2022

Blogpost

Oscar Broughton

Translating Guild Socialism: The Case of Eva Schumann (1889–1967)

In 1920, Eva Schumann wrote from her home in Dresden to the offices of the National Guilds League in London offering her services as a translator. Her intention was to help popularise the political program of Guild Socialism in Germany, which she believed shared parallels with other socialist ideas already popular in her homeland...

Category: Research, Scholarships

31 May 2022

Blogpost

Maximilian Priebe

Conceptual History as a Philosophical Methodology: The Case of Hans Blumenberg’s Metaphorology

In a first blog post, I suggested that the figure of Hans Blumenberg can help us to understand one of the major differences between the ‘Cambridge School’ of intellectual history and Begriffsgeschichte, or conceptual history. This difference, I argued, is a disciplinary one: whereas Cambridge School intellectual history operates mainly in the fields of the historiography of political thought and contemporary political theory, conceptual historians intervene in a wider array of discourses and make more diverse use of historical insights...

Category: Research

26 May 2022

Blogpost

Maximilian Priebe

What Is, and To What End Do We Study, Intellectual History?: A Comparison of Two Approaches: The ‘Cambridge School’ and ‘Conceptual History’

From 2–4 June 2022, the German Association for British Studies will host its annual conference under the title of ‘From Cambridge to Bielefeld—and Back? British and Continental Approaches to Intellectual History’. Two specific—and local—schools of thought and their respective groups of thinkers are thus at the heart of the conference…

Category: Research

5 May 2022

Blogpost

Marie Cabadi

Women’s Centres and their Newsletters: Feminist Spaces and Print Cultures in Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom

From about 1969 onwards, women’s centres had proliferated in towns and cities of various sizes—first in the United States, then across the globe, including in the United Kingdom, Belgium, and France. Also called ‘women’s houses’ outside of English-speaking regions, they were places of feminist activism and sociability, aiming to provide services to local women and to participate in the growth of the women’s movement. Usually women-only, they regularly became focal points of local feminist scenes...

Category: ISWG, Research

21 April 2022

Blogpost

Chantal Bsdurrek

A Brotherhood of Soldiers? Concepts of Comradeship 1914–1938

Whether we watch movies, read novels, play video games, look at paintings, or listen to podcasts about the First World War, we encounter expressions of what we consider to be the comradeship of the trenches. The idea of the soldiers holding fast together through all hardships, living together, and loving each other like brothers, even dying for one another, has become a central part of the collective memory of the ‘Great War’...

Category: Research, Scholarships

5 April 2022

Blogpost

Martin Christ

Recording the Dead in Early Modern London and Munich

Recording the names of the dead has a long tradition in human societies. Lists of the dead come in many different forms: as a call to remember the dead, as a reminder of some kind of sacrifice or traumatic event, or as a means to keep track of mortality patterns....

Category: Research, Scholarships

22 March 2022

Blogpost

Michael Schaich

New Publication on Manuscript Newsletters around 1700

The new volume Scribal News in Politics and Parliament 1660–1760, which has just been published as a special issue of the journal Parliamentary History, gathers twelve essays by scholars from Britain, Europe, and North America on the role of scribal news in reporting about parliament and politics in Britain between 1660 and 1760. The volume grew out of a one-day conference held between the History of Parliament and the German Historical Institute London...

Category: Publications

24 February 2022

Blogpost

Kassandra Hammel

Conference Report: The History of Medialization and Empowerment: The Intersection of Women’s Rights Activism and the Media, 20–21 January 2022

The third and final meeting of the International Standing Working Group on Medialization and Empowerment was held virtually on January 20 and 21, 2022. At the end of a three-year project, looking at the interconnections, contingencies, and dependencies of women’s rights and the media throughout the long-twentieth century, the conference explored the role of the media in shaping and constituting discussions of gender roles and women’s rights globally...

Category: Events, ISWG, Research

17 February 2022

Blogpost

Cristina Sasse

Directories and the Legibility of Urban Spaces, 1760–1830

Between 1760 and 1830, town directories became a popular medium for the representation of English urban landscapes. Their main feature was a list of local tradespeople and ‘notable’ inhabitants along with their occupations and places of residence. Often, descriptions of the town, its history, and other information on transport links, amenities, and sights were added, thus combining classic elements of the guidebook with the directory...

Category: Publications

1 February 2022

Blogpost

Anita Klingler

Talking about Political Violence in Interwar Britain and Germany

As its title suggests, the thesis examines political violence and how it was spoken about in public forums (parliament and the press) in interwar Britain and Germany. In doing so, it focuses particularly on reconstructing how certain acts of political violence were either justified or condemned in public language, and what this language tells us about the identities and self-images constructed through it in both countries. The project started out, however, as something quite different....

Category: Prizes, Research

20 January 2022

Blogpost

Anne M. Valk

Imagining a Transnational and Transhistorical Movement Against Violence

As a college student in the U.S. in the 1980s, I first became aware of Take Back the Night. In countless cities, towns, and campuses across the U.S., feminist organizations coordinated these annual events to protest violence against women. Participants—typically women (and often intentionally and exclusively women)—gathered for night-time marches and rallies...

Category: ISWG, Research

11 January 2022

Blogpost

Vicente Pons Martí

Perspectives on Political Parties in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Since the emergence of the first nation states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, political parties have become one of the most important and influential actors in Western political systems. It is hard to imagine a functioning Western democracy without the presence of political parties, yet they have always been accompanied by criticism and rejection...

Category: Research, Scholarships

9 December 2021

Blogpost

Joseph Cronin

The Future of Holocaust Studies in Light of the ‘Catechism Debate’: Reflections from an Observer

This post has been adapted from a talk by Joseph Cronin, a former Researcher at the GHIL and now a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, delivered at the Holocaust Research Institute’s New Directions in Holocaust Studies workshop, which was held at Senate House London on 4 November 2021. [...] The talk was prompted by and reflected on Joseph’s perceptions of the ‘German Catechism’ debate that took place in the summer of 2021.

Category: Dialogue

18 November 2021

Blogpost

Jane Freeland

The Politics of Photography: An Interview with Mary-Ann Kennedy

In the run-up to the launch of the GHIL’s online exhibition ‘Forms, Voices, Networks: Feminism and the Media‘ on 23 November, 2021 at 1pm GMT, we chatted with artist and activist Mary Ann Kennedy. Kennedy is a founding member of the Photography Workshop (Edinburgh)/Portfolio Gallery and the WildFires network for women who work in and with photography in Scotland. She is currently the Programme Leader for the BA(Hons) Photography degree at Edinburgh Napier University...

Category: Events, Research, ISWG

11 November 2021

Blogpost

Marcus Meer

Conference Report: The Twelfth Medieval History Seminar, 30 September–2 October 2021

Now in its twelfth iteration, the biennial Medieval History Seminar (MHS) has become an established platform for postgraduate students to present and discuss ongoing research projects on the Middle Ages with distinguished medievalists as well as their peers. It has also become a cherished tradition of the German Historical Institute London...

Category: Events

28 October 2021

Blogpost

Alexandria Ruble

Sustaining ‘Information for Women’: The Informationsdienst für Frauenfragen, the American Military Occupation, and Women’s Politics in West Germany, 1951–1990

‘The Women’s Affairs unit…is based on the recognition of the fact that German women are in a decisive position either to promote or retard the development of Germany as a democratic state.’ This statement appeared as part of a 1949 report by the Women’s Affairs branch of the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS).

Category: Research, ISWG

28 September 2021

Blogpost

Maissan Hassan

‘Doing Well, Don’t Worry’: Exhibiting Archives as a Feminist Practice

In 2014, my colleagues at the Cairo-based Women and Memory Forum (WMF) and I decided to establish a women’s museum in Egypt. I was motivated by two things. The first was the absence of feminist narratives in museums in Egypt and across the Arab region...

Category: ISWG, Research

15 September 2021

Blogpost

Sabrina Mittermeier

#IchBinHanna: What next?

Since around the middle of June 2021, academics in Germany have been posting reports of their experiences and criticisms of the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz (WissZeitVG) or German Law on Fixed-Term Contracts in Higher Education and Research1 under the Twitter hashtag #IchBinHanna...

Category: Dialogue, Race, History, Academia

31 August 2021

Blogpost

Jane Freeland

Understanding Social Change through the Digital Humanities

How has the mass media supported, enabled or challenged women’s emancipation? How have feminists used the media to promote women’s issues and rights? How have these messages been interpreted by the public? And how has this changed since the emergence of the mass press in the late nineteenth century?

Category: Research, ISWG

28 July 2021

Blogpost

Charlotta Salmi

Framing Women’s Rights in Nepali Street Art

If you walk down the streets of Kathmandu, you can’t fail to notice its vibrant street art scene. When I first visited the city in 2018, I was taken aback by the juxtaposition of heritage buildings and slick urban iconography that defined the capital and its environs...

Category: ISWG, Research

13 July 2021

Blogpost

Julian Katz

Intervention on Behalf of Foreign Subjects during the Anglo-Spanish War, 1585–1604

It is fitting that my dissertation on the idea of intervention and protection of foreign subjects during the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) has been published in the GHIL’s series, as it touches on one of the most researched periods of English history: the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the Anglo-Spanish War...

Category: Publications, Research

1 July 2021

Blogpost

Rike Szill

Prophecies and (Hi)Stories: Telling the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453

From a Euro-Mediterranean perspective, the conquest of Constantinople led by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453 not only marked the end of the Byzantine empire that had lasted more than a millennium, but also the end of the European Middle Ages. Rightly considered a ‘moment of great historical significance’ by both contemporaries and modern researchers...

Category: Research, Scholarships

17 June 2021

Blogpost

Johanna Gehmacher

The Production of Historical Feminisms, Part Two: Transnational Strategies and the Feminist ‘We’

International networks played an essential role in the development of feminist movements in the nineteenth century. since the 1880s, regular international women’s conferences spurred a strong transnational dynamic. Reports on the development of the women’s movement in the delegates’ own countries published in conference proceedings were a key part of these meetings...

Category: ISWG, Research

8 June 2021

Blogpost

Dorothea McEwan

Ethiopia Illustrated: Manuscripts and Painting in Ethiopia – Examples from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century

The newly published anthology Ethiopia Illustrated: Church Paintings, Maps and Drawings is a result of my appointment as Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences in 2017. The suggestion was aired to publish a volume with my research articles on Ethiopian manuscripts and paintings, which had previously appeared in a variety of journals...

Category: Publications, Research

27 May 2021

Blogpost

Johanna Gehmacher

The Production of Historical Feminisms, Part One: Historical Awareness and Political Activism

In the early 1970s, a slim pink book designated as the first issue in a series titled Frauen(raub)druck (Women’s (Bootleg) Print) became a best-seller in the burgeoning women’s movement in German-speaking countries. To categorise the influential publication is, however, a challenging task for more than one reason...

Category: ISWG, Research

06 May 2021

Blogpost

Paul Labelle

Britten’s Virtual Mystery

In 1964 the first of composer Benjamin Britten and writer William Plomer’s ‘Church Parables’ – Curlew River – was premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival in St. Bartholomew’s Church in Orford. Britten had been working on the project off and on with his librettist Plomer following Britten’s encounter with Noh theatre during a visit to Japan in 1955...

Category: Research, Scholarships

27 April 2021

Blogpost

Kirsten Kamphuis

Not your Average National Hero: Scattered Archives and the Women of the Indonesian Anticolonial Movement

In her captivating autobiographical novel Buiten het gareel [Out of Line], the Indonesian author Suwarsih Djojopuspito painted a vivid image of her experiences as an activist teacher during the last few years of Dutch rule in Indonesia. The book, published in Dutch in 1940, tells the story of Sulastri, an idealistic young teacher who runs a non-governmental school for Indonesian children together with her husband, Sugondo...

Category: ISWG, Research

13 April 2021

Blogpost

Manuel Kohlert

Vicarious Observation: Conveying Pleasure and Sensory Experience in Eighteenth-Century British Periodicals

The time I spent perusing the British Library’s early modern treasures – thanks to a scholarship from the German Historical Institute London – left me with much to think about for my current research project on the body and pleasure in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century periodicals...

Category: Research, Scholarships

30 March 2021

Blogpost

Jennifer L. Rodgers

The Spaces Between: Interstitial Archives and Childbirth Activism in 1970s West Germany and the United States

Most people who know me will tell you that I enjoy fewer things more than foraging in archives. I have been an archive rat since my days as a researcher on a national historical commission. My love of unusual nuggets (an asbestos sample), dust-encrusted fingers, and the tangible vestiges of previous researchers (documents bedecked in cigarette burns), is even becoming a monograph...

Category: ISWG, Research

16 March 2021

Blogpost

Birte Meinschien

Historiography in Emigration: German Historians in Great Britain after 1933

It is doubly fitting that my book on German-speaking historians who emigrated to Britain after 1933 has now been published in the GHIL’s book series. As the holder of a GHIL scholarship, I had the pleasure to be based at the Institute during two archival research trips to London...

Category: Publications

4 March 2021

Blogpost

Matthias Büttner

Days of Betrayal: Violations of Trust and Loyalty in Late Medieval England

Tensions have been running high in what, by any reckoning, has been a challenging year: a raging pandemic, social instability, and political unrest. And amidst all this, battle cries are heard from every corner of the political spectrum that threaten to exacerbate the situation: Plotters! Betrayers! Traitors! — the world is full of them if you believe what is written in the comment sections of media outlets.

Category: Research, Scholarships

23 February 2021

Blogpost

D-M Withers

Knowledge Trouble: Practice, Theory and Anxiety in late 1970s Feminist Movements

The British Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) of the late 1970s was marked by intense anxiety and discussion about the status of ‘theory’. At their last national conference held in Birmingham in 1978, the WLM buckled under the weight of a decade of collectively generated, epistemic and ideological complexity, cut across by social divisions of race, sexuality and class...

Category: ISWG, Research

10 February 2021

Blogpost

Morgan Golf-French

Beyond Heroes and Villains: Reassessing Racism in the German Enlightenment

In post-1945 German culture the Enlightenment has generally been a source of celebration. Since at least the publication of Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947), however, intellectuals have considered the possibility that Enlightenment philosophy may have contributed to twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Category: Race, History, and Academia, Research

28 January 2021

Blogpost

Jane Freeland et al.

Conference Report: ‘Archiving, Recording and Representing Feminism: The Global History of Women’s Emancipation in the Twentieth Century’

The second meeting of the International Standing Working Group on Medialization and Empowerment was held virtually between December 10 and 12, 2020.

Category: Events, ISWG

20 January 2021

Blogpost

Marcus Meer

Broken Symbols: Display and Destruction during the Attack on the Capitol

Almost two weeks later, recordings and photographs of the attack on the Capitol are still making newspaper headlines, flicker across screens, and fill the feeds on social media.

Category: Research

14 January 2021

Blogpost

Pierre Sfendules

An Ancient Church Father and his Victorian Audience: Christian von Bunsen’s...

As nineteenth-century Europe faced the challenges of advancing modernity and its shattering consequences for the religious mind, a lost treatise by an ancient Church Father, the Philosophoumena, was rediscovered in the dusty library of Mount Athos...

Category: Research

6 January 2021

Blogpost

Nuriani Hamdan et al.

"Who remains?" (Part 1): Before we even start our research…

It is tedious and exhausting to identify and name mechanisms of disadvantage. To remember those anecdotes that keep coming back, although you don’t want to remember. Memories that eventually become part of your own narrative about yourself, although you might want it to be different. ...

Category: Race, History, and Academia