Born in 1980, Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska studied cultural studies and sociology at the Universities in Lodz, Giessen and Mainz. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Lodz in 2008 and…
Author Archive for editorial board
TraFo
The Historical Junkyards of Cairo
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By Shehab Ismail. The city of Cairo was surrounded by human-made mounds composed of rubbish and debris that had been piling up on the same spots for centuries. This blog post narrates how the author encountered the rubbish mounds during his research on the history of sanitation in Cairo. It explores two materials that were commonly found in the city’s dumpsters: archeological finds and organic fertilizers.
TraFo
Book Review: Global Publics: Their Power and Their Limits, 1870-1990
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By Christoph Streb In light of recent phenomena of global communication like #MeToo, Fridays for Future, and the proliferating conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus pandemic, this book on the history…
TraFo
The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives
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Founded in Brussels in 1927, the League Against Imperialism attracted anticolonial activists like Nehru, Sukarno, and Kenyatta, as well as figures like Einstein and Madame Sun Yat-Sen. Its immediate goals were to develop solidarity between communists, socialists, and anti-colonial nationalists worldwide.
TraFo
On Dersim and the Banality of Evil: The Diary of Yusuf Kenan Akım
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By Zeynep Türkyilmaz. Entering my usual keywords randomly to see what is out there in my areas of interest, I came across a diary of a Turkish soldier kept during the year 1938.
TraFo
“The Ideological Deportation of Foreigners and ‘Local Subjects of Foreign Extraction’ in Interwar Egypt” – Interview with Rim Naguib
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Rim Naguib’s article, “The Ideological Deportation of Foreigners and ‘Local Subjects of Foreign Extraction’ in Interwar Egypt”, was published by the Arab Studies Journal this fall. In this interview, Rim discusses her research interests, her recent article, and the complex relationships between colonial legacies and processes of national independence in (interwar) Egypt.
TraFo
Nation-building as Entangled History: Turkey and the League of Nations
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Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş, Research Fellow at the GHI Washington, published her first monograph titled „Verflochtene Nationsbildung. Die Neue Türkei und der Völkerbund 1918–38“ this summer. Here, she gives us some insights into her recent publication.
TraFo
Modernization Dreams, Lusotropical Promises: A Global Studies Perspective on Brazil-Mozambique Development Discourse
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By Ana Beatriz Ribeiro. Across disciplines, scholars writing on Brazil used to take for granted the state actor’s image as a particularly open-minded “emerging power.”
TraFo
“In the face of a systematic erosion of memory, I was intrigued by the preservation of what was gone” – 5in10 with Sana Tannoury-Karam
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Sana Tannoury-Karam is a historian of the modern Middle East, writing on the intellectual history of the Left in the Levant. She is a EUME fellow 2020-2021 at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
TraFo
Three Questions That Make One
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By Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh. Over the past two decades, Middle Eastern and European politics have been impacted by three critical developments that call into question dominant understandings of nationalism, citizenship, and decolonization. The aggressive and ongoing colonization of Palestine created irreversible realities that cast serious doubts on the feasibility of partition and the “two-state solution.”
TraFo
“Research in local archives and the exchange with colleagues led to a shift of my research focus” – 5in10 with Mario Peters
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Mario Peters is a Research Fellow in American and Transatlantic History at the GHI Washington. His current research interests are spread across the intersection of mobility studies, environmental history, and the study of Inter-American relations. In his new project, he examines the development of Pan-American transportation infrastructures between 1870 and 1970, focusing on the cooperation and exchange of knowledge between North American and Latin American experts who contributed to the planning and construction of these infrastructures.
TraFo
“So, surely with hardship comes ease” (Quran 94:5): Seeking acceptance and the quest for unity during the Corona pandemic
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By Yanti Hölzchen and Gulniza Taalaibekova. When the Corona pandemic gained momentum in early 2020, Kyrgyzstan was among the first countries worldwide to shut down international air traffic, to close their borders for foreign nationals, and to go into a governmentally initiated state of emergency.
TraFo
Taboo, Trauma and Identity: Subject Constructions of Palestinians in Germany and in Switzerland, 1960 to 2015
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By Sarah El Bulbeisi. Since 1947, more than 700,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes in what is now Israel, and have become refugees. As a traumatic experience, the Nakba has become a crucial part of the collective memory and the identities of the Palestinians.
TraFo
“As a Historian, the Archive Remains the Foundation of My Practice” – 5in10 with Pascale Siegrist
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Pascale Siegrist joined the GHI London in October 2020. She is an intellectual historian interested in the margins of the canon; her first book project deals with the ‘global’ thought of fin-de-siècle anarchists. At the GHI London she is developing a new project on the worlds of invented languages.
TraFo
Migrant Dreams: Egyptian Workers in the Gulf States
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Interview with Samuli Schielke. Samuli Schielke’s latest book, Migrant Dreams: Egyptian Workers in the Gulf States (AUC Press, 2020), is a vivid ethnography of Egyptian migrants to the Arab Gulf states. It investigates the imagination that migration thrives on, and the hopes and ambitions generated by the repeated experience of leaving and returning home.
TraFo
Exiled Among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age – Interview with John P.R. Eicher
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Earlier this year, the monograph “Exiled Among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age” by John P.R. Eicher was published by Cambridge University Press, in the Publications of the German Historical Institute Series. We talked with the author about the origins of his book, the role of institutions for diasporic groups and links between his research and today’s world.
TraFo
Book Review: A. Getachew: Worldmaking after Empire
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By Christopher J. Lee. Worldmaking after Empire is a study of political thought and institution building during the twentieth century, with a specific focus on black Anglophone leaders and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere. The central argument of the book is that the anticolonialism they promoted was not solely concerned with national self-determination and the establishment of nation-states.
TraFo
Speaking about the virus: the language of war in the Reformed Church in Zambia
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By Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps & Hermen Kroesbergen. In Zambia, like in other African countries, the COVID-19 pandemic started very slowly, while the government was quick to take action. Even before the first Coronavirus case on Zambian soil was confirmed on 18 March 2020, hygiene measures were announced and all schools and universities were closed.
TraFo
Teaching Science Fiction While Living It in Lebanon
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By Nadya Sbaiti. What is the point of teaching dystopian science fiction when actually living something just as terrifying? Reflecting on the last year in Lebanon, this essay argues for the pedagogical power of sci fi in thinking through the country’s popular uprising, economic implosion, pandemic, and port explosion.
TraFo
“Postcolonial legal systems embody the paradoxes of decolonisation” – 5in10 with Jihane Chedouki
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Jihane Chedouki is a legal scholar and a political scientist. She was a EUME Fellow 2019-20. She is currently working on a project entitled “Regulating War in Times of Modernity: A Critical Approach of the Comparison of International Humanitarian Law and Islamic Law on the Use of Force”.
TraFo
Southern African Liberation Movements and the Global Cold War ‘East’ – Transnational Activism 1960–1990
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By Lena Dallywater, Chris Saunders, and Helder Adegar Fonseca. The authors in this volume argue that the links between the liberation movements and the Global East must be understood in their local contexts, including personal agendas and internal conflicts, rather than primarily in the traditional framework of Cold War competition.
TraFo
Ottoman Children and Youth during World War I – Interview with Nazan Maksudyan
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Interview on Nazan’s book “Ottoman Children and Youth during World War I” that was awarded the AMECYS 2020 book award. Nazan is Einstein guest professor at the Freie Universität Berlin and a EUME Fellow 2009-10.
TraFo
Perestroika and the “Wild” 1990s: State, Society, and the Individual in Eastern Europe, 1985–2000
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On March 18–19, 2021, the workshop “Perestroika and the ‘Wild’ 1990s: State, Society, and the Individual in Eastern Europe, 1985–2000,” will take place at the German Historical Institute in Moscow. We talked with the convener Alexey Tikhomirov.
TraFo
Cambodian Court Dance After Genocide: Embodied Heritage and the Limits of Critique
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By Philip Geisler During a seminar trip to Cambodia last year with the research program Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices, our group continuously encountered people engaged in creative practices –…
TraFo
Hello? How Can I Help You Today? : Mental Health Concerns for LGBTQIA+ People During Covid-19
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By Joshua Muyiwa While the common global refrain has been that we live in unprecedented times, it shouldn’t be remembered to mean the worst alone. It has also engendered the…
TraFo
Religion and Covid-19 under observation: the Asia-focused research blog CoronAsur
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By Natalie Lang When the world came to a halt in many places because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and researchers were worried about their fieldwork trips and research plans, Carola…
TraFo
“‘Urban Culture’ Really Is Best Seen as a Pan-European Phenomenon” – 5in10 with Marcus Meer
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Marcus Meer is a historian of communication and visual culture. He completed his PhD at the University of Durham as a Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar and worked as a Graduate Teaching…
TraFo
Coronavirus and the Middle East’s ongoing state of emergency
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Abdalhadi Alijla, Post-doctoral fellow at the Orient Institute in Beirut, recently published an article on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Middle East. The region was hit hard…
TraFo
“Nomadism Is Understood as an Anachronistic and Primitive Lifestyle” – 5in10 with Sina Steglich
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Sina Steglich received her PhD from the University of Mannheim with a project on the history of temporalities in the nineteenth century and holds an MA in History, German Literature…
TraFo
COVID-19 and Security Risks for Women: Indoors and Outdoors
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By Ailynn Torres Santana We are facing a global crisis with global consequences. On the one hand, the Covid-19 crisis has exposed impoverished public health systems, weak labor rights, high…
TraFo
Iqbal, German Orientalism and the Making of Modern Mysticism
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By Razak Khan This article is part of the TRAFO Series “40 Years After Orientalism”. I emphasize in it accordingly that neither the term Orient nor the concept of the…
TraFo
The Digital Transformation of Work: COVID-19 as a Taste of Things to Come?
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By Lena Hipp After more than three months of working from home and school closures, many Germans are currently experiencing a return to what we considered “normal” before the outbreak…
TraFo
Understanding Childhood and Construction of National Identities
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On 20-21 January 2021, the conference „Understanding Childhood and Construction of National Identities“ will take place at the branch office of the German Historical Institute Warsaw in Vilnius. We talked to the convener Gintarė Malinauskaitė about the upcoming event.
TraFo
Household Divisions of Labor and Care Work in Times of COVID-19: Empirical Lessons from Hungary
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By Éva Fodor, Anikó Gregor, Júlia Koltai and Eszter Kováts The Gendered Effects of COVID-19: A Deluge of Social Problems The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic immediately brought up several…
TraFo
Book Review: L. Spinney: 1918 – Die Welt im Fieber
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By Steffy Marung | Laura Spinney has written a best-selling book, which is in major (online) book stores currently not available in its English original, but one may still be able to chase one of its translations in German, Dutch, French, Croatian, Italian, Czech or Spanish.
TraFo
Viral Devotionality and Christian Solidarity In/Beyond Borneo
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By Liana Chua As COVID-19 began to spread across Malaysia in early 2020, Jesus began to materialise with increasing frequency on my Facebook feed. A familiar figure with light skin,…
TraFo
COVID-19, Technology, and the Future of Care Work
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By Vidisha Mishra The COVID-19 outbreak is exacerbating existing multiple and intersecting systemic inequalities. Evidence from previous pandemics and fast-emerging trends indicate that the ongoing global pandemic is not gender…
TraFo
Book Review: M. Maruschke, M. Middell: The French Revolution as a Moment of Respatialization
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Since the 1990s, the historiography on the French Revolution has seen a major refocus in the context of the so-called “global turn”. However, the disparate conceptual framework within which this…
TraFo
Rewriting Histories of Care in the Times of Corona
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By Eliska Bujokova The term ‘research impact’ has become a buzzword in funding applications across academia, but as the current crisis has shown, its use often seems rather hollow. Doing…
TraFo
Portals of Globalization: Repositioning Mumbai’s Ports and Zones, 1833–2014
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By Megan Maruschke Social scientists tend to talk about globalization as a challenge to nation states; its threat, especially to developing states, is often illustrated in special economic zones, export…