News

Second Meeting Bern-Leipzig, November 2023

Convenors:
Moritz von Brescius and Christof Dejung (Bern)
Steffi Marung and Antje Dietze (Leipzig)

In her keynote, Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara, explores intimate labors (domestic, care, and sex work in both their commodified and unpaid forms) as informal labors during the century of labor standardization, 1870-1970, when such labor often went unrecognized as work or stood outside of formalization through union organizing and legal codification of the employer-employee relation. Intimate labor, she suggests, belongs to a transnational story with the circulation of people and ideas.

31 August 2023, Room S 201, UniS, Schanzeneckstrasse 1, 3012 Bern
17:45         Reception
18:15         Keynote by Eileen Boris

Convenors: Sibylle Marti (Bern), Christof Dejung (Bern), Susan Carin Zimmermann (Vienna)

The devastating impacts of the man-made climate catastrophe are omnipresent. From New York City’s skyline covered in orange smoke, to melting glaciers in the Alps or the Himalaya, to the recent breaking of mountain summits at the Swiss Border. What can research on the past contribute to the solution of current and future challenges of climate change? A talk about «summits» and the challenges of environmental history with Christian Rohr, Professor of Environmental History at the University of Bern. From the 22 to the 26 August 2023, Christian Rohr and the Department of Economic, Social and Environmental History (WSU) of the University of Bern will co-host the 12th conference of the European Society for Environmental History. The conference theme has been chosen in connection to Bern’s closeness to the Alps: «Mountains and Plains: Past, present and future environmental and climatic entanglements.»

→ Registration is open until 8 August 2023
→ ESEH Conference 2023

The picture shows the work at the Archives de l'ancien Evêché de Bâle in Porrentruy (Canton Jura). One sees a huge bound book consisting of many individual accounts: the court accounts of the Bishop of Basel from 1458-1474.

Comment of the jury: With its strong composition and sharpness, the image challenges our expectation of high-tech research. Blurring history and contemporality, this pile of old documents invading our contemporary life conjures up our weighty past.

→ See the picure

Conference, 14-15 June 2023
Harvard University
Organizer: Moritz von Brescius (Bern/Harvard)

→ Further information

In the Volkswagen Foundation-funded research project «Turning Land into Capital. Historical Periods of the (Re-)Production of Wealth in Latin America from the 19th to the 21st Century», we offer an excellent opportunity to pursue a PhD within a network of four universities in Latin America as well as the Universities of Bern and Bielefeld.

→ Project page
→ Application

In the second half of the 20th century, the concept of sustainability came to the fore in political, economic, social, and scientific discussions. The climate crisis, population growth, the depletion of non-renewable natural resources, among other factors, led all sectors of society on a global scale to ask themselves: how to satisfy the needs of our species in the present, without irreversibly affecting our planet or the quality of life of future generations. The discourses and practices of sustainability were nourished by contributions from different disciplines and geographical contexts. The discourses and practices that have emerged in Latin America have brought about a whole current of proposals to approach but also to question notions of sustainability and, particularly, sustainable development. During this workshop, various aspects of the discourses and practices of sustainability in Latin America will be discussed in a local, national, and global context.

University of Bern, May 25 & 26 2023
Location: UniS, A -119 and via Zoom

The change in terminology in the title of this conference — from nature to cosmic regularity — should help to break new ground in the description of the concept of nature in the Roman imperial period. At the same time, the term «laws of cosmic regularity» maintains the focus on what is at stake in modern laws of nature: regularity and control. Thus, the conference will address the range of fundamental ideas from which people during the roman imperial period drew to explain natural processes. It will explore the reasons for the momentum of certain ideas and concepts as well as inquire whether and how the sweeping persuasion of these rules can be linked to other rules governing people’s reason at the time, such as grammar, rhetoric, strategic thinking, or technology.

14 and 15 September 2023 at Unitobler and Münstergasse Library. Registration until 1 September.
Organisation: Monika Amsler (monika.amsler@unibe.ch)

→ Further Informationen
→ Registration

Latin America is one of the most urbanized regions on earth. At the same time, the one with the highest social inequality indexes in the world. This workshop will investigate how Latin American cities are altered and spatially transformed by consumption related processes, transforming Latin American cities into laboratories for experimenting with new possibilities of sociality. Wealth (re)distribution and social policies seem to relate to urban consumption in a particular reproduc-tion of social inequality in which values, attitudes, ideas and political measures influenced urban struggles and definitively changed the fu-ture of the city as a social device.

Location: Universidade Federal Fluminese | Campus do Gragoatá – Auditório do PPGH, Bloco O, 5° andar

To sign up, please send an email to: melina.teubner@unibe.ch

Organisation: Institute of History (Chair of Modern History) and Center for Global Studies, University of Bern 
Convenor: Sibylle Marti (Bern) 

29 March 2023: Research Colloquium History Post-1800
30 March 2023: Workshop / CGS-Forum: Contested Concepts of Labor: Slavery and Informality 

Are you about to change from a bachelor's to a master's degree program and still have a lot of questions? We will inform you on site and online during this year's Master's open days!
We look forward to welcoming you on the following dates:

March 21, 2023 (on site) | March 22, 2023 (on site) | March 23, 2023 (online)

→ Sign up now!

Publication of Moisés Prieto:

Narratives of Dictatorship in the Age of Revolution. Emotions, Power and Legitimacy in the Atlantic Space
Routledge, 2023

→ Publication

On August 28–29, 2023, the Ambizione project led by Moritz von Brescius (Bern) will organize a major international conference on the theme of «Natural Resources, Sovereignty and Markets: Revisiting Socio-Economic Histories of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries», with confirmed keynote speaker Prof. Dr. Corey Ross (Birmingham). Applications can be submitted until February 28, 2023.

→ Call for Papers