Workshop: Figures, Types, and Images of the Social in the 19th and 20th Century: Practices of Social Imagining in the History of Knowledge and the Sciences, 20.-21.11.2025, Erfurt

Univ. of Erfurt and Friedrich-Schiller-Univ. Jena, Cluster of Excellence “Imaginamics. Practices and Dynamics of Social Imagining”

Venue: International Meeting Center Erfurt
Time: 20.-21.11.2025

„It is no easy matter […] to arrange the several varieties of work into ‚orders‘, and to group the manifold species of arts under few comprehensive genera, so that the mind may grasp the whole at one effort – it is a task of most perplexing character“, wrote Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London poor (1849-1851). Mayhew’s early social research in London is well known – but far less so that he lived in Paris at the end of the 1830s, when the new medium of illustrated journals and collective publications experienced its heyday there, bringing together images and texts, artistic-literary and scientific circles in a new, creative way. Back in London, Mayhew also worked between popular journalism and social statistics, consciously drawing on pictorial representations of social types for the latter, with which he fundamentally helped to shape ideas of the social.

Programme (PDF)

Thu., 20.11.2025

  • 13:15 Welcome & Introduction: Bernhard Kleeberg (Erfurt), Adriana Markantonatos (Jena), Jasmin Köhler (Jena)

13:45 Session I | Chair: Adriana Markantonatos (Jena)

  • Tobias Schlechtriemen (Freiburg): Social Figures as Articulations of the Social: Between Literature, the Public, and Sociology
  • Kathrin Yacavone (Marburg): Types and Series: On the Photographic Construction of Writers as Public Figures

15:30 Session II | Chair: Bernhard Kleeberg (Erfurt)

  • Hannah Goetze (Paris): L’Éducation sociale? Learning to Read as Political Instruction in the mid-1800s in France
  • Jessica Resvick (Oberlin): Character and Type in the Realist Novel
  • Kevin Kempke (Stuttgart): Literary Model Cases – Social Figures in the Works of Siegfried Kracauer and Early 20th-century Sociography

17:45 Session III | Chair: Maxim Braun (Jena)

  • Sarah Goeth (Aachen): Common Sense and Observance: Statistical Narration of the Social in the 19th Century
  • Christoph Streb (Paris): From Infrastructure Networks to Social Networks: Complicating the Relationship between Technological and Social Images in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Fri., 21.11.2025

9:00 Session IV | Chair: John Norrman (Jena)

  • Dirk Schuck (Erfurt): Early Social-Scientific Reflections on Servant Girls and Fashion Objects
  • Miray Eroglu (Philadelphia): Affairs of the Heart: Representations of Foreigners in Late-Ottoman Exotica

10:45 Session V | Chair: Jasmin Köhler (Jena)

  • Annelie Ramsbrock (Greifswald): The Addict: On the Social Cartography of a Global Figure in the 19th and 20th Centuries
  • Ya’ara Gil-Glazer (Tel-Hai): Reframing the Erotic: Art Nouveau and the Shaping of Sexual Typologies in Suck Magazine
  • Manuel Bolz (Göttingen): Urban Crisis Figures in the Entertainment History of Hamburg St. Pauli after the Second World War – Ethnographic Perspectives

12:45 Final Discussion

Kontakt: adriana.markantonatos@uni-jena.de

Source: HSozKult