Between Precarity and Persistence: Concepts, Methods, and Topics in Global History

In honor of the 70th birthday of Madeleine Herren, former Director of the Institute for European Global Studies and Professor emerita of Modern History, the Institute for European Global Studies is hosting the international conference “Between Precarity and Persistence: Concepts, Methods, and Topics in Global History”. The event asks what global history can – and should – contribute in the coming years. The program will feature leading scholars in global, economic, and transnational history. Participation in the conference is by invitation.

How can historians rethink established approaches considering recurrent crises, contested global orders and the changing relationship between capital, governance, and mobility? What new perspectives emerge when capitalism, logistics and international organisations are understood as infrastructures of inequality as well as of connection? And how might new forms of (digital) data and methodological innovation transform the practice of global and transnational history?

Program:

11:15 – 11:30
Introduction
Corey Ross (Basel) and Lars Kury (Basel)

11:30 – 13:00

Keynote Lecture: Thinking in Chains: Revisiting the Emergence of Global Cotton Capitalism, 1784–1833 Mary O’Sullivan (Geneva)
Chair: Corey Ross (Basel)

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch Break

14:00 – 14:45
Salvaging Global History
Roland Wenzlhuemer (Munich) 
Chair: Lars Kury (Basel)

14:45 – 15:30
Human Origins: A Global Perspective
Johannes Paulmann (Mainz) 
Chair: Benjamin Auberer (Munich)

15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 – 16:45
Race Decolonisation and Human Rights: Thinking Global European History from the Perspective of the Ecumenical Movement
Isabella Löhr (Potsdam)
Chair: Lea Katharina Kasper (Basel)

16:45 – 17:30
Selling Global Economic History to Gens Z and Alpha, or how to write a Book?
Ines Prodöhl (Bergen)
Chair: Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş (Potsdam)

17:30 – 18:30
Round Table
Susanna Burghartz (Basel) · Amalia Ribi Forclaz (Geneva) Madeleine Herren (Basel) · Kerstin von Lingen (Vienna) Moderation: Corey Ross (Basel)

From 19:00
Greeting Address: Thomas Staehelin (President, Stiftung Europainstitut Basel) 
Tribute for Madeleine Herren: Sacha Zala (Bern)