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.
Continue reading Not your Average National Hero: Scattered Archives and the Women of the Indonesian Anticolonial MovementVicarious 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. First and foremost, my time in London gave me a heightened sense of how newspapers and magazines functioned as a medium for conveying pleasure, not least as a sensory experience.
Continue reading Vicarious Observation: Conveying Pleasure and Sensory Experience in Eighteenth-Century British PeriodicalsThe 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 about one archive and its uses and abuses in the post-World War II era.
Continue reading The Spaces Between: Interstitial Archives and Childbirth Activism in 1970s West Germany and the United StatesHistoriography 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, and since the majority of sources for my project are in British archives, the chance to visit Britain and consult materials in person was indispensable. The GHIL also provided a highly stimulating intellectual environment, especially when I spoke about my Ph.D. project at the Institute‘s colloquium, which strongly shaped the ultimate direction of my research.
Continue reading Historiography in Emigration: German Historians in Great Britain after 1933Days 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.1 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.
Continue reading Days of Betrayal: Violations of Trust and Loyalty in Late Medieval England- I would like to thank the German Historical Institute London for supporting my research despite the adverse circumstances, and for giving me the chance to take part in the Institute’s always lively and constructive doctoral colloquium, which helped me to come to a better understanding of my subject and source material. [↩]
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. In the aftermath, a radical feminist day workshop was held at the White Lion Free School, London, in April 1979, partly ‘out of a sense of desperation at feeling that none of the most evident and vocal factions at the plenary represented the politics of very many women in Women’s Liberation.’1 The meeting was also an occasion to unpick the movement’s ideological and, increasingly theoretical, density.
Continue reading Knowledge Trouble – Practice, Theory and Anxiety in late 1970s Feminist Movements- ‘We are the Feminists that Women Have Warned Us About:* Introductory Paper’, in Feminist Practice: Notes from the Tenth Year! (Theoretically Speaking) (London, 1979), 1–4, at 1. [↩]
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.
Continue reading Beyond Heroes and Villains: Reassessing Racism in the German EnlightenmentConference 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. Bringing together 29 scholars from Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America, the conference examined the theme of “Archiving, Recording and Representing Feminism: The Global History of Women’s Emancipation in the Twentieth Century.” Drawing from an interdisciplinary methodology, it explored how processes of narrrativization and the cataloguing of knowledge, whether in the media, the archive or in historical practice, have shaped the development and understandings of women’s emancipation. Convened by Christina von Hodenberg and Jane Freeland (GHI London), alongside partners at the Max Weber Stiftung India Branch Office, the German Historical Institute Washington, D.C., the German Historical Institute Rome and the Orient Institute Beirut, the conference forms part of the international research project “Knowledge Unbound: Internationalization, Networking, Innovation in and by the Max Weber Stiftung” and is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
Continue reading Conference Report: ‘Archiving, Recording and Representing Feminism: The Global History of Women’s Emancipation in the Twentieth Century’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. Countless commentators described the attack as an extraordinary event in the history of the United States. Joe Biden called it ‘unprecedented’; The New York Times described it as a threat to ‘the heart of American democracy’. But the shock and anger in response to the attack were not just fuelled by its attempt to interfere with the election of a new president or the fact that several people died as a result. They were also fuelled by acts of destruction, which were chronicled and communicated by observers and actors alike. As Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer deplored:
Continue reading Broken Symbols: Display and Destruction during the Attack on the CapitolAn Ancient Church Father and his Victorian Audience: Christian von Bunsen’s Unusual Work on Hippolytus of Rome and its Influence on Nineteenth-Century Debates
Continue reading An Ancient Church Father and his Victorian Audience: Christian von Bunsen’s Unusual Work on Hippolytus of Rome and its Influence on Nineteenth-Century Debates[T]he amiable curates were politely requested to dribble out a few drops from the full fountain of their patristic lore, that poor benighted Farmer Giles in his chimney-corner might read, for the first time in his life, the talismanic name of Hippolytus.1
- [Anon.], ʻHippolytus and his Ageʼ, The Eclectic Review, 8 (1854), 690–8, at 690. [↩]