Det globalhistoriska seminariet: LAUGH
Globalhistoria vid historiska institutionen samlas i gruppen LAUGH: the Lund Assembly for Universal and Global History.
Intresset för att vidga det historiska perspektivet utanför nationella gränser har vuxit sedan det tidiga 1990-talet. Flera forskare har talat om en ”världshistorisk vändning” eller en ”transnationell trend”. Perspektivskiftet kan inringas av begrepp som global historia, världshistoria, transnationell historia, jämförande historia, histoire croisée och entangled history. Med detta seminarium vill vi lyfta fram pågående forskning inom fältet och diskutera relationen mellan teori och empiri samt hur dessa perspektiv påverkar vår syn på det förflutna.
Vi hälsar alla intresserade välkomna, studenter såväl som forskare.
Schema HT25 Globalhistoriska seminariet LAUGH
All seminars are from 10:00-12:00 at LUX: A332 and on Zoom. Contact Cecilia Lundström or Natacha Klein Käfer for Zoom link or questions about the HT25 schedule.
OCTOBER 7
From Shared Spaces to Private Rooms: The Architecture of Privacy in Greenlandic Inuit Homes of the 19th Century – Asta Mønsted and Natalie Körner (University of Copenhagen and PRIVACY)
Together, we explore how privacy was organized and experienced in 19th-century Greenlandic Inuit communal houses. We show how the spatial layout of the shared winter house, with its partitioned family areas, reflected a social contract of privacy that carried across seasons and dwelling types. Meanwhile, this social and spatial order was profoundly disrupted in the 1830s and 40s with the arrival of European materials and technologies.
Bio: Asta Mønsted is a Greenlandic-Danish trained archaeologist specialized in Arctic cultural heritage. She has participated in archaeological excavations in Greenland, Denmark, Germany and Japan. Her research focuses on integrating Inuit oral tradition with archaeological sources, and she argues that contemporary architects can draw inspiration from Greenland's prehistoric building culture – with the aim of giving modern Greenlanders the opportunity to mirror their cultural heritage and reflect on their urban environments.
Bio: Natalie Körner is associate professor at the Royal Danish Academy (Department of Architecture and Space) and PRIVACY (the Danish National Research Foundation's Center of Excellence). She leads the research group Privacy in the Early Modern Home. In her research, she examines current topics such as privacy and climate change in relation to the role of the environment in the early modern period (1500–1800). Her research has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Architectural Histories. She originally trained as an architect and her design work has been exhibited at Officinet, Space10 and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, among others.
OCTOBER 14
‘HealingUtopia’: Toward a Prescription for a Prosocial Change - Liam Benison (University of Verona)
The COVID-19 pandemic showed how politics can derail evidence-based health policy, and experts recommend the promotion of prosociality (‘voluntary behaviour intended to benefit another’) to address this problem in the future. Similar challenges were faced in Europe during the first global age (c. 1492–1750) when, for example, merchants opposed Italian health boards’ mandates to manage the plague. Inspired by accounts of peoples in the Americas and the burgeoning Renaissance sciences of health and anatomy, utopian writers reflected on the conflict between individual freedom and prosociality to envision models of a healthy society. I define utopianism as a method of sociopolitical analysis that provokes reflection on social problems and proposes ideas and models for prosocial change. The aim of this paper is to present the outlines of a new research project, ‘HealingUtopia’, which will investigate the meaning of health in utopianism with an ambition to impact present-day health policy debates.
Bio: Liam Benison is researcher in the Department of Cultures and Civilizations, University of Verona, where he teaches bibliography and library science in Italian. He is member of the Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies (CETAPS), University of Porto; and an affiliated scholar of the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen. His research project, “Privutopia”, funded in Italy via the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Seal of Excellence scheme, investigates the meaning of privacy in early modern utopianism. He is editor of Utopian Possibilities: Models, Theories, Critiques (U.Porto Press, 2023) and is currently preparing (with Jelena Bakić) an edited volume on Privacy in Early Modern Paratexts for Brill.
NOVEMBER 18
Fugitive Motherhood: Women Running from Slavery in the Insular Caribbean, 1770s-1870s – Felicia Fricke (University of Copenhagen)
This paper uses advertisements from colonial Caribbean newspapers to examine women’s, and specifically mothers’, fugitivity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores themes such as pregnancy, gendered parenthood, and family; and asks whether children’s ages had an impact on mothers’ fugitive decision making. Placing these women and mothers in the wider context of Caribbean fugitivity, it provides an important angle on efforts towards freedom that takes women’s fugitivity on its own terms, even though women ran less often than men. What does this gender imbalance say about women’s options and decisions? And what can a big-data, inter-imperial, and multi-lingual approach offer us in seeking to understand the personal experiences of fugitive women?
Bio: Dr. Felicia J. Fricke is a Postdoctoral Fellow/an Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen. She is an archaeologist and historian of the Caribbean, currently working as a member of the Racialized Motherhood: Documenting and Analysing Early Modern Discourses on Reproduction project (PI: Natália da Silva Perez). Dr. Fricke has her PhD from the University of Kent (2019) and has published in English, Dutch, and Papiamentu, including articles, book chapters, professional codes, and a monograph.
NOVEMBER 24
Books, Networks, and Worldviews: Don Juan José de Austria's Library as a Laboratory of Global Knowledge (1629-1679) – Frank Ejby Poulsen (European University Institute)
This paper examines the private library of Don Juan José de Austria (1629-1679) as a microcosm of early modern knowledge production and global circulation, analyzing how this illegitimate son of Philip IV assembled, curated, and disseminated worldviews through his extensive collection across his various governmental posts in Flanders, Catalonia, and Naples. Through systematic analysis of his library's contents—particularly works on mathematics, arts, and global affairs—we can trace the intellectual networks that shaped his understanding of Spain's expanding world and identify the specific knowledge frameworks he promoted through the scholarly societies he established in each territory he governed. This case study demonstrates the potential for a broader comparative methodology that could illuminate how elite private libraries functioned as nodes in global knowledge networks, offering a new lens for understanding how information about the world was filtered, transformed, and circulated through informal intellectual channels during the early modern period.
Bio: Frank Ejby Poulsen is an independent researcher with a PhD in history from the European University Institute. He was a postdoctoral researcher at one of the Danish National Research Foundation Centres of Excellence and has won several grant fellowships, notably from NextGenerationEU in Spain and the German Research Foundation. He has published an award-winning monograph with DeGruyter and several articles in leading journals. One of his current research interests lies in early modern knowledge circulation between the home and the world.
DECEMBER 1
“This most spacious and fertile Monarchy”: Edward Terry’s colonialist botanography – Angana Moitra
My presentation will focus on the meticulous detailing of the victuals, foodstuffs, and indigenous flora and fauna of India that Edward Terry recorded in his compendious Voyage to East India. Terry was a chaplain in the embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, sent by the East India Company (EIC) to the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir. While historiography has focused on how the British started appropriating indigenous medicinal knowledge which they repackaged as scientific discourse from the 19th century onwards, my presentation argues that the practice of turning a classificatory eye to the colonies with a view to understanding—and, by extension, ruling—them better started with the first voyages of the EIC in the 17th century itself. Terry’s practice of classifying and recording the vegetation of the country—what I call “colonialist botanography”—was one of the earliest attempts made by the British in this direction.
Bio: Angana Moitra is a postdoctoral researcher in the project Secrets to Patents: Trans-Imperial Strategies for Keeping Medicines as Private Assets from 1500 to 1900 at the Centre for Privacy Studies and Assistant Professor of English at O.P. Jindal Global University in India. She completed her PhD in 2020 through the Erasmus Mundus TEEME (Text and Event in Early Modern Europe) Joint Doctoral Programme, with affiliations at the University of Kent and Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests span the length and breadth of the literary, religious, and political cultures of the European medieval and early modern periods, with a particular focus on the continuities and correspondences between the two.
DECEMBER 8
Time Apart in the early English East India Company - Mark Williams (Cardiff University)
This seminar is a joint seminar with the Gendering Global HIstory Seminar Series. NB! This seminar is held 10:00-11:00 AM CET entirely on Zoom.
DECEMBER 9
Brazilian Beef: A National Cuisine in a Transimperial Setting 1880-1980 – Oscar Broughton (University of London)
Today, few foods are more central to Brazilian national cuisine than beef. However, the connections between beef and Brazil are anything but inevitable. Until the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian beef industry remained a relatively marginal part of the domestic and global economy. This situation changed dramatically in the century between 1880 and 1980, when beef became an increasingly core constituent of the national diet. This shift was not simply a matter of dietary change but the outcome of intersecting processes: internal projects of nation-building, which sought to define and standardise Brazilian food culture, and external pressures exerted by imperial powers, including the United States, Britain, Japan, and Portugal, that reshaped patterns of production, trade, and consumption.
Bio: Oscar Broughton recently completed his Ph.D. at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at Humboldt University and the Free University of Berlin. He is currently a Teaching Fellow at SOAS, University of London. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Research Centre Global Dynamics (ReCentGlobe) at Leipzig University and a Visiting Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute London.