German Historical Institute London – Summer Lecture Series 2022

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Date / time: 24 May - 26 July, 5:30 pm

Location
German Historical Institute London (and online via Zoom)

German Historical Institute London – Summer Lecture Series 2022

The GHIL invites you to its upcoming Summer Lecture Series 2022. Lectures are usually held on Tuesdays at 5.30pm in a hybrid format at the GHIL and via Zoom. GHIL Joint Lectures are presented in cooperation with the Faculty of History, University of Oxford; Modern German History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research; and other distinguished institutions.

Please register to attend in person or virtually by following this link to our website: https://www.ghil.ac.uk/events/lectures#c1144

24 May 2022 (5.30pm) | GHIL LECTURE | Martina Steber (Munich)

‘A very English superstar’ : John Rutter, Popular Classical Music, and Transnational Conservatism since the 1970s

It has gone largely unnoticed by musicologists and historians that the British composer, conductor, and music entrepreneur John Rutter has become a leading figure in popular music since the 1980s. Successful on the global music market, popular in the English-speaking world, and regularly topping the classical music charts with his Christmas carol compositions, Rutter embodies the opposite of commercial pop culture. He is the antitype of a pop star: he succeeds with sacred music, he addresses the middle class, and he personifies family values, community spirit, and the preservation of tradition. Using the example of Rutter, the lecture will demonstrate the importance of conservative pop cultures for the emergence and development of transnational conservatism in Europe and North America since the 1970s.

Martina Steber has been Deputy Head of the Munich Research Department of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) since 2017. She was previously a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute London from 2007 to 2012, a Fellow of the Historisches Kolleg in Munich in 2012/13, a Research Fellow at the IfZ, and Deputy Professor at the Universities of Augsburg, Konstanz, and Wuppertal in 2016–18 and 2020. Her research focuses on modern German and British history, especially the history of the Nazi regime, conservatism, and regional history.

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ghil-lecture-martina-steber-ifz-munich-tickets-341960662547

1 June 2022 (5.30pm) |GHIL JOINT LECTURE In co-operation with the Modern German History Seminar, IHR | Ute Frevert (Berlin)

The Power of Emotions in German History

Everyone knows from experience that emotions are powerful: they motivate us to act in a certain way, they colour our experiences and shape our memories. But what impact do they have on history? What do we learn about history from looking through the lens of emotions? And what do we learn about emotions by applying a historical perspective? The talk explores those questions with regard to Germany in the twentieth century, a period of dramatic changes that deeply affected people’s lives, mindsets, and feelings.

Ute Frevert is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, where she founded the Center for the History of Emotions in 2008. She has previously been a professor of modern history at the universities of Berlin, Konstanz, Bielefeld, and Yale. She is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Her book Powerful Emotions in German History will be published by CUP later this year.

21 June 2022 (5.30pm) | GHIL LECTURE | Carsten Jahnke (Copenhagen)

The Hanseatic League as a National Project

Today, the Hanseatic League is anchored in the general consciousness of Germans as the ‘secret superpower’. Around 1800, however, the Göttingen professor Sartorius chose it as the subject of a major work because he could find nothing more irrelevant than this ‘half-forgotten antique’. How could a half-forgotten antique become a superpower? The lecture will trace the mnemonic strategies which were used by historians from 1830 to anchor the Hanseatic League in the minds of the Germans, first as a history of the Third Estate and the Free Cities, then as a (proto-)Protestant unifier against the hated Habsburgs, and finally as a Germanic national maritime power against England.

Carsten Jahnke (1968) is an Associate Professor of Medieval History at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen. His main areas of interest are medieval economic and social history, and especially the history of the Hanseatic League. He is a member of the Board of the Hansischer Geschichtsverein and author of monographs and articles on the history of the Hanseatic League and Lübeck.

12 July 2022 (5.30pm) | GHIL LECTURE | Prabhu Mohapatra (Delhi)

A Genealogy of Labour Regulation in India: The Career of the Employment Contract

26 July 2022 (5.30pm) | GHIL LECTURE | Janaki Nair (New Delhi)

The Classroom as Sensorium: Tactility, Attention, and Perception in the Mysore School, 1860–1930

How was the hand to be guided, the eye to be trained, the senses sharpened in preparing the child for an adult world? In princely Mysore in southern India, the missionaries, who took the initial steps in opening up education to wider circles than those entitled to forms of knowledge, and the Government efforts that followed were faced with new and complex challenges in a society wracked by the proscriptions of caste and gender. On the one hand, the classroom presented opportunities for ordering space and time, and for remaking bodies and habits in the process of building new skills.

But the classroom and the boarding school were perforce also sites of unlearning, of breaking down habits and prejudices relating to touch/sight, as well as older skills and styles of learning, in order to enable the modern educated subject to emerge. A small but suggestive body of visual and other records allows for speculation about the experience of schooling in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Mysore.Janaki Nair taught Modern History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and since retirement has also taught at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Most of her research, teaching, and writing have been on labour, urban, and legal history, feminist history, and visual culture. Her books include Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule (2011); The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century (2005); and Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History (1996).

RHS