GHIL Research

The project explores the perception and (re)negotiation of status and social order in post-Roman western Europe by comparatively analysing the definition and implementation of hierarchies in the Frankish World and Anglo-Saxon England. It focuses on the records of church councils and synods, regarding these assemblies as crucial for the development of new societal models in an age of transition.

This project analyses monetary information in chronicles of cities, monasteries (both men’s and women’s), and courts across north-western Europe as a versatile communicative tool that shaped economic thought and practice, and that was placed in the service of institutional strategies of remembering the past for the needs of the (medieval) present and expressing aspirations around the future of medieval society. 

How should human and non-human beings live together? How to distribute resources in a model society? In the 16^th and 17^th centuries, the place through which utopian answers to such questions were developed and tested was often the city. The project explores urban nature in literary and built ideal cities, focusing on utopian conceptualisations as well as everyday human-environment relations.

The papers from the High Court of Admiralty Prize Court collection (1664–1817) at the National Archives, Kew consist of documents and objects from ships that were legally taken as prizes in maritime warfare. The lawfulness of the capture had to be confirmed by the Court, who retained the papers. This collection, together with the corresponding process files, has been preserved largely untouched and unsorted as the only surviving collection of its kind in Europe. The aim of the project is the complete digitization of the Prize Papers, including the preservation of the collection’s material dimension, the initial and in-depth cataloguing, the creation of research-oriented metadata, and finally the presentation of the digital copies and the metadata in an open-access research database.

Why would a well-educated man or woman subscribe, at great cost, to a hand-written newsletter when cheaper newspapers were already easily available? This project investigates the so far largely hidden sphere of scribal news in a world dominated by the printing press, and follows the flows of information that ran between Britain and the Continent in the years around 1700.

Pauper letters and applications for relief contain sometimes rudimentary but often extensive information on the applicants’ material situation, their family circumstances, and their relationships with their home parish, or specific officials or friends from whom they expect support. This project proposes to collect and edit a substantial online corpus of these narratives.

The editorial project presents a comprehensive selection of diplomatic reports written for the Foreign Office by British envoys to the German States in the 19th century, covering the period from the Vienna Congress in 1815 to the dissolution of the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) in 1866, the North German Confederation (1867–1870), and from the foundation of the German Kaiserreich in 1871 to 1897.

This project explores not only the actual photographs, but also their detachment from their original archival context, their circulation on the art market, and their display across different types of museums and institutions. This is done in order to determine the disciplinary framework for studying early photographic specimens, whether scientific, industrial, or colonial.

This project gives a transregional perspective on museums, collecting, and fieldwork as an imperial enterprise incorporating the British Empire, France, and Prussia. It shows how emerging survey methods and disciplines such as archaeology were instrumentalized in political, orientalist and racial discourse in the increasingly contested landscape of the Ottoman Empire.

What is considered 'normal' and why? How are notions of normality communicated, reproduced and negotiated? What are the differences between academic and individual understandings of normality? In my project I examine how social scientists, historians and those being researched in Germany and Britain produced knowledge about normality in the 20th century.

Taking the 1904 Ancient Monuments Preservation Act as a point of entry, this project examines the relationship between colonial law, its implementation by colonial bureaucracy, and the ‘making’ of historic monuments in India under British rule. The study focuses on Hindu religious structures. It looks beyond policy-making and analyses the many ways in which Indians exercised agency when faced with state power ‘on site’.

During the interwar years, sociologists started to invent ‘qualitative’ methods to understand how people lived their everyday lives – and how they made sense of them. My project will compare two of these new groups of researchers: the Chicago School and the British Mass Observation project. I will investigate the extent to which both groups were similar or different, and why.

The project understands the inventing of a language – whether for political, epistemic, or artistic purposes – as an act of world-making. Focusing on the proliferation of artificial languages in the English-speaking world in the period from the 1920s to the 1980s, the project situates these initiatives in the context of wider debates concerning the universality or cultural relativity of language.

Focusing on major Indian cities, the research group examines the relation between education and the urban as a category in Indian society, which has undergone rapid and complex processes of urbanisation in the seven decades since independence from colonial rule in 1947. The project is conducted by Principal Investigators from Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi), the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai) and the National Institute of Advance Studies (Bengaluru) along with the Head of the IRP.

M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies

To what extent did old people, especially ageing women, play an active part in the processes of value change that transformed West Germany and Britain from the 1960s to the 1980s? Contemporary historians have often pointed to student protests and generational conflict between fathers and sons to explain cultural change. In contrast, this project explores the gendered subtext of value conflicts and the agency of women and the elderly.

Historians working on the second half of the 20th century are confronted with new types of sources: so-called social data. These are the remains of state-sponsored data collection or social science research projects, and include tax data, polls, psychological interviews and participant observations. Such data can appear in obsolete formats such as punchcards or magnetic tapes, and may be found in retired researchers’ attics rather than in archives. The GHIL has teamed up with external partners to tackle the challenges tied to the re-use of social data by historians.

This project examines historical tourist guidebooks and locally produced historical tracts that circulate around historical/heritage sites in Murshidabad in eastern India. The aim is to understand the mutually constitutive relationship between popular regional ideas of the past and the changing political sphere in India since the late decades of the previous century.

This project looks at the rise of internet platforms dealing in histories of the Indian subcontinent. It asks how, why and for whom these platforms constitute 'archives'. It examines the affective, material, visual and geopolitical registers they deploy and conjure, situating them in relation to institutional and/or stubbornly analogue collections; activist media projects; and popular history initiatives in Africa and the Middle East.

This project traces the development of photography as an everyday practice in South Asia, focusing on women’s engagements with the camera in and beyond the household.