Current projects and events

Current research projects

Infrastructures of Memory: Actants of Globalisation and their Impact on German and Polish Memory Culture.

Individual Research Project: immersive digital technologies in historical exhibitions

Immersive digitale technologies are used in similar ways in different museums and regardless of the cultural context. In the future, they will have a growing influence on the modes of remembrance. What role does the physical and emotional dimension play when visitors experience the reconstructed past within a VR/MR environment? How to create critical, historical distance within the immersive environments? Can this be conveyed at all when it comes to creating an atmospheric feeling of the the past in the present? The analysis will encompass also genre standards (narrative patterns on which VR applications are based) and reception conditions (location of the presentation, environment).

Doing history - reenactment as performative practice in the USA, Germany and Poland

Doing gender in historical reenactment

The commencement and development of reenactments in the GDR

Presentation

Juliane Tomann: Historische Reenactments in der DDR. Lebendige Geschichte zwischen eigensinniger Freizeitgestaltung und Geschichtspolitik

Regensburg 19. October 2023, 14 ct.

GSOSESUR, Landshuter Str. 4, Room 319

Workshop

Nuclear Heritage in East-Central Europe

Potsdam, 7th-8th December 2023

Programm

With this workshop we would like to contribute to and further develop the emerging field of research on nuclear cultural heritage by proposing a focus on former nuclear-related facilities in East-Central Europe. This regional focus will help to narrow down the variety of possible research objects which could include both urban and landscape formations as well as institutions and even encompass entire communities inclusive of technological and research institutes, testing grounds, power plants, military or medical facilities, atomic cities and other locales (Rindzevičiūtė, 2019; Wendland, 2015). Focusing on case studies documenting the formation of nuclear cultural heritage sites in East-Central Europe we aim to develop a more coherent empirical base to discuss this newly emerging field and enhance comparisons of heritagization process within the region. We plan to invite contributions employing theoretical, epistemological, and/or methodological perspectives based on the assumptions and developments of critical heritage studies in particular, but with a broad interdisciplinary spectrum including expertise rooted in history, anthropology, sociology or tourism or cultural studies.

Call for Papers 

Deadline CfP: 15th July 2023

Workshops

Reconfiguring history beyond disciplinarity. Emerging interdisciplinary research fields and their approaches towards history

Everyone is talking about interdisciplinarity. But what does this mean in relation to history? What happens when researchers looking at the past are not trained historians but rather have a background in performance studies? Which approaches do newer research fields employ when investigating the past and what do they understand by the term “history”? And what interdisciplinary approaches does history use to gain new information about the past? These questions are investigated in the series of workshops in 2021 and 2022, with international participants from differing disciplines and academic fields. The results will be published as a special issue.

You can find a report on the first workshop here. Following workshops took place in January and October 2022. The results of the discussions will be summarized in a special issue for the journal "Rethinking History", which will be published in 2024.

This is a joint project with Joanna Wawrzyniak  (Sociology, University of Warsaw) and the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena.

Publication projects

Juliane Tomann and Joanna Wawrzyniak (eds.):Beyond Disciplinarity: Emerging Interdisciplinary Fields and Their Reconfigurations of History. Special Issue (Rethinking History, forthcoming 2024).

Blog "Doing I Public I History"

Cord Arendes and Stefanie Samida from Heidelberg University, and myself run the blog "Doing I Public I History". It is devoted, in particular, to the performative practice of public history, and puts forward different modes of making history as "doing history".