RESEARCH CROSSING BOUNDARIES GHIL Blog There is a lot going on at the German Historical Institute, both within and without the walls of our beautiful building on London’s Bloomsbury Square. With this blog, we want to share with you insights into ongoing research projects, reflections on current debates in our fields, notes from scholarship holders, and reports on events and publications. If you would like to be notified about future posts, you can sign up for our RSS feed. You can browse all of our posts, past and present, in the dropdown menus or go straight to the blog. 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on 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 Read on Previous blogposts 2020 Contact and Enquiries German Historical Institute London 17 Bloomsbury Square London WC1A 2NJ Tel. +44-(0)20 7309 2050 Data Protection and Legal Notice Follow the GHIL Blog Subscribe to the GHIL Newsletter Browse the Library Catalogue