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Associate Fellow
Professor Gadi Algazi
Tel Aviv University
Arbeit, Haushalt und Lebensführung: Die Forma vitae der Humanisten im deutschsprachigen Raum, 1450-1630.
is professor of medieval history in the Department of History at the University of Tel Aviv, senior editor of the journal History & Memory, and member of the publishing collective for the journal Past & Present and Historische Anthropologie. He studied in Tel Aviv und Göttingen, was on the staff of the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, was a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His research encompasses, in particular, the social and cultural history of the late Middle Ages and early modern period, historical anthropology, colonial history, as well as the history, theories and methodologies of the social sciences.
At the International Research Center, Gadi Algazi will be writing a book on the rise of learned families and the scholarly habitus between 1450 and 1630. He will attempt to show the origins of a particular mode of life – a process that is especially well-documented in the case of scholars, above all in the sixteenth-century German-speaking world. Forms of work and family, income structures, and the daily routine will be newly figured. Methodologically speaking the project is at the interface between the history of science, gender history, historical research into the family, and the anthropology of early modern lifestyles.
Publications
Gadi Algazi, Valentin Groebner & Bernhard Jussen (eds.). Negotiating the Gift: Pre-Modern Figurations of Exchange. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2003.
"Habitus, familia und forma vitae: Die Lebensweisen mittelalterlicher Gelehrten in muslimischen, jüdischen und christlichen Gemeinden – vergleichend betrachtet". In: Frank Rexroth (ed.). Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Gelehrten im späten Mittelalter. Osftildern: Thorbecke 2010. (Vorträge und Forschungen, 73).
"Norbert Elias’s Motion Pictures: History, Cinema and Gestures in the Process of Civilization". In: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 39 (2008), 444–458.
"Scholars in Households: Refiguring the Learned Habitus, 1480-1550". In: Science in Context 16 (2003), 9–42.
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Associate Fellow
Professor Josef Ehmer
Universität Wien
Late to Work, Early to Retirement. The Long-Term Trends of Declining Labour Force Participation by Young and Elderly People. A Comparative Review.
teaches social and economic history at the University of Vienna. Before this he was professor for late-modern history at the University of Salzburg. Guest professorships took him to, among other places, the Free University Berlin, the European University Institute in Florence, and the University of Cambridge. His research encompasses the broad spectrum of European social history from the early modern period to the present day, some of his topics being work and the worker, the family and aging, historical demography and migration.
At the International Research Center, Josef Ehmer will be attempting to conceptually correlate two long historical trends – the increasingly late entry of young people into the field of gainful employment, and the increasingly early retirement of older individuals from the work world. Both trends have been well documented worldwide, but they have neither been sufficiently explained nor examined from a comparative perspective. Josef Ehmer is particularly interested in the interaction between three continuously changing factors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the structure of employment markets, the preferences of actors in terms of work and leisure time, and the alternatives to gainful employment through educational systems for younger people, pension systems for older individuals and family and domestic work for women.
Publications
Josef Ehmer and Toni Pierenkemper (eds.), Arbeit im Lebenszyklus / Work in the Life-Cycle (Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook 2008 - 1), Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2008.
Josef Ehmer and Otfried Höffe (eds.), Bilder des Alters im Wandel: Historische, interkulturelle, theoretische und aktuelle Perspektiven, Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft: Stuttgart 2009 (Nova Acta Leopoldina, NF 99, Nr. 363).
Josef Ehmer and Catharina Lis (eds.), The Idea of Work in Europe from Antiquity to Early Modern Times, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009.
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Guest of the Director 2010/2011
Professor Baz Lecocq
Universität Gent
The "Awad el Djouh Affair". Slave Trade to Saudi Arabia, Human Rights, and the ILO (1948-1962).
is an Africanist historian, holding a PhD in the social sciences from Amsterdam University (2002). Between 2003 and 2007 he worked as a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin on the contemporary history of (labor) migration and the urbanization of the Tuareg people in the Central Sahara (Libya, Mali, Niger). Since 2007 he has been lecturing in African history at Ghent University. His complete curriculum vitae can be found at the website of the CCC (Communities, Comparisons, Connections) Research Group at Ghent University.
Baz Lecocq will be working on the slave trade from French West Africa to the Arabian Peninsula in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1950s, the continued existence of this slave trade drew wide international media attention. This, in turn, influenced debates on slavery, the slave trade and human rights within the Communauté Française, the International Labor Organization, and the Working Commission drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His project uses the mediatized micro-histories of the slave trade as a lens to analyze the discursive construction of the postcolonial world in the North Atlantic, Africa and the Middle East. This discursive history will be framed by the Cold War "questions" that gave it shape: labor issues, decolonization in Africa, and the changing geopolitics between the North Atlantic and the Middle East. Methodologically, the project will address the ways in which microstoria, the study of discursive praxis, and “classical” political history can be combined to intertwine historical actors across polities, policies, legal systems and continents into a single global and translocal history.
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Guest of the Director 2009/2010
Professor Hagen Schulz-Forberg
University of Aarhus
Conceptual History and Global Translations: The Euro-Asian Semantics of the Social and the Economic.
is an historian and received his doctorate from the European University Institute in Florence. As of 2007 he has been teaching international history at the University of Aarhus. His complete curriculum vitae can be found at the website of the University of Aarhus.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg is participating in a larger project on the global history of work: Conceptual History and Global Translations: The Euro-Asian Semantics of the Social and the Economic. The goal of this research field (jointly developed with Bo Strath, the Renvall Institute and the University of Helsinki) is to investigate the conception and imagining of the “social” and the “economic” in various European and Asiatic languages. Both concepts can be semantically located in the Western world, so their use in a global world without a Western center is extremely problematic. The project’s objective is to create a transnational epistemological basis that equitably comprises both Asian and European ideas and conceptions relating to both notions. At the center of the project is the question as to what degree the dominance of Western-shaped ideas and concepts can be overcome in favor of a kind of global communication that crosses cultural and civilizational divides. The concern here is not to play Asian and European perspectives off against one another but rather to conjoin both perspectives in historical processes.
Publications
(2010), with Bo Strath, The Political History of European Integration: The Hypocrisy of Democracy-through-market, Basingstoke: Routledge.
(forthcoming 2011) (ed.), Zero Hours. Conceptual Insecurities and Ideas of New Beginnings in the Interwar Period from a Global Perspective, Brussels et al.: P.I.E. - Peter Lang.
(forthcoming 2012), with Morakot Jewachinda-Meyer (eds.), Appropriating the Social and the Economic: Asian Translations, Conceptualizations and Mobilizations of European Key Concepts from the 1860s to the 1940s.
(2011), 'Before Integration: Human Rights and Post-War Europe', in Menno Spiering and Michael Wintle (eds.), European Identity and the Second World War, London: Palgrave, 37-54.
(forthcoming 2011), 'Which Way to the Good Society? The Liberal Crisis and the Birth of Neoliberalism after the First World War', in Hagen Schulz-Forberg (ed.), Zero Hours. Conceptual Insecurities and Ideas of New Beginnings in the Interwar Period from a Global Perspective, Brussels et al.: P.I.E. - Peter Lang.
(forthcoming 2012), 'Global Conceptual History - Theory and Practice of a New Research Field', in Hagen Schulz-Forberg and Morakot Jewachinda-Meyer (eds.), Appropriating the Social and the Economic: Asian Translations, Conceptualizations and Mobilizations of European Key Concepts from the 1860s to the 1940s.
(forthcoming 2012), 'Sovereignty', in Global Studies Encyclopedia, London: Sage.
(forthcoming 2012), 'Welfare State', in Global Studies Encyclopedia, London: Sage.
(forthcoming 2012), 'World Federalist Movement', in Global Studies Encyclopedia, London: Sage.