Tuesday, 12 September, GHIL/Zoom, 5.30pm (BST)
Short Film as Global Form: India c. 1940-1960
Ravi Vasudevan (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi)

This presentation explores the short film and documentary as a global form that is used to engage and instruct audiences. The history of the genre is inflected by the logics of colonial power, nationalist mobilization, developmental and consumer imaginaries, and cold war agenda. Taking India as a focus, the lecture examines connected and comparative histories, referring to colonial film units and the ‘official’ films of the nation-state period in Africa, South-East Asia, and East Asia, as well as the role of international institutions such as UNESCO and the Technical Cooperation Mission of the USA.

Ravi Vasudevan is a film and media historian. His recent publications include Documentary Now (ed.: 2018) and Media and the Constitution of the Political: South Asia and Beyond (ed.: 2021). He co-founded the screen studies journal Bioscope and, with Ravi Sundaram, directs Sarai, the media research programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

Tuesday, 10 October, GHIL/Zoom, 5.30pm (BST)
Peasants, Wars, and Evil Coins: Towards a ‘Monetary Turn’ in Explaining the Revolution of 1525
Philipp Rössner (University of Manchester)

The ‘Great German Peasant War’ of 1524–6 has quietly slipped off the historian’s agenda. Structural-materialist interpretations have waned since the fall of the Iron Curtain, giving rise to several ‘cultural’ and other ‘turns’, most of which have also passed. One phenomenon, however, has been missed completely, in older as well as more recent historiography: the monetary problem. Monetary issues—relating to currency and how different coins were used to pay fines, dues, and tithes—featured in most known medieval peasant grievances up to the Peasant War proper, significantly contributing to the peasants’ economic cause for revolt. This paper suggests how a ‘monetary turn’ may shed new light on Germany’s first modern revolution.

Philipp Robinson Rössner is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester. He has published books on early modern Scotland, Reformation Germany, Martin Luther as an ‘economist’, mercantilism, cameralism, and economic development. He held a Heisenbergstipendium (senior research fellowship) at Leipzig University, and he won the 2012 Walter Hävernick Prize for the best book in numismatics and monetary history.

Tuesday, 17 October, GHIL/Zoom, 5.30pm (BST)
Becoming Catholic in the Middle East: Early Modern Fantasies and Modern Myths
John-Paul Ghobrial (University of Oxford)

The history of Eastern Christianity has been distorted by several myths that have their origins in the fantasies of early modern Catholic missionaries. This lecture seeks to identify (and debunk) some of these myths through a close study of the first generation of Catholic missionaries who travelled to Aleppo, Diyarbakir, and Mosul in the seventeenth century. In doing so, it asks: how does the history of the Catholic Reformation change if we begin our enquiry not with ideas of ‘global’ reformation, but with the specific process of becoming Catholic as it was experienced in everyday life in the Ottoman Empire?

John-Paul Ghobrial is Professor of Modern and Global History at the University of Oxford, and Lucas Fellow and Tutor in History at Balliol College, Oxford. He has published extensively on a range of themes in Middle Eastern history including early modern mobility, Eastern Christianity, and the history of information, archives, and record-keeping.

Friday, 10 November, Senate House/Zoom, 5.30pm (GMT)
In co-operation with the Modern History Research Seminar, University of Oxford
Societies under Siege: Experiencing States of Emergency in the Long Twentieth Century
Stefanie Middendorf (University of Jena)

Today, the state of emergency seems to be as permanent as it is omnipresent. The term became ubiquitous in the early twentieth century and continues to guide the self-description of contemporary societies. Yet, referring to ‘emergencies’ implies a large range of meanings, from actual states of war to moments of humanitarian crisis, from abstract realms of the law to concrete territories under siege. The lecture argues for a history of emergency experiences in the long twentieth century that reaches beyond ‘classical theories’ and focuses on the social dimensions of administrative agency instead. It treats the ‘state of emergency’ as an imaginary that informs technocratic practices and legal theory at the same time, and argues that historicizing it can help us to understand the critical role of the state apparatus in moments of transformation.

Stefanie Middendorf is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Her research centres on German and European history, especially the social history of statehood, experiences of crises and war, and cultural dimensions of capitalist economies. Her book Macht der Ausnahme: Reichsfinanzministerium und Staatlichkeit (1919–1945) was published in 2022, and a collective volume on practices of public debt is due out in September 2023.

Tuesday, 12 December, Senate House/Zoom, 5.30pm (GMT)
Chasing a Phantom: An African Skull in European Politics
Jesse Bucher (Roanoke College, Salem, VA) and Bettina Brockmeyer (Justus Liebig University Giessen)

This presentation addresses some of the ways in which the skull of Chief Mkwawa has functioned as an object of European politics, memory, and imagination. It will trace claims about the skull that have appeared in political treaties, scientific research, novels, films, and comics in order to demonstrate how human remains—even ones that do not always exist as ‘real objects’—feature within European cultural heritage. The talk will also address how two historians respectively based in Europe and the United States have sought to both investigate the known history of Mkwawa’s skull and problematize their own work on this history.

Bettina Brockmeyer is Professor of Modern History at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. Her research focuses on gender, the body, and colonial history. Her book Geteilte Geschichte, geraubte Geschichte (2021) analyses colonial biographies in East Africa, and, together with Frank Edward and Holger Stoecker, she published the article ‘The Mkwawa Complex: A Tanzanian–European History about Provenance, Memory, and Politics’ in the Journal of Modern European History in 2020.

Jesse Bucher is Director of the Center for Studying Structures of Race, and Associate Professor of African History at Roanoke College, USA. Bucher’s research utilizes postcolonial and critical theory to interpret the history of political violence, colonialism, and slavery in Tanzania, South Africa, and the United States. He published ‘The Skull of Mkwawa and the Politics of Indirect Rule in Tanganyika’ in the Journal of Eastern African Studies in 2016.