Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe Univ. Frankfurt a.M., Bad Homburg v.d.H.: Frederike Middelhoff (Modern German Literature, Goethe Univ. Frankfurt a.M.), Friedemann Pestel (Modern History, Univ. of Tübingen), and Kelly Summers (Humanities, MacEwan Univ.) (Web)
Time: 24.-26.07.2025
Venue: Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Deutschland
Proposals by: 10.12.2024
During the Age of Revolutions (c. 1770-1830), Europe and the Americas were convulsed by a wave of interrelated political upheavals, social protests, slave rebellions, and wars. Republican alternatives to monarchies proliferated, even as colonial wars and abolitionist insurrections shook even the most entrenched empires. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people found themselves displaced and dispersed across the Atlantic world. While some chose to leave out of political or religious principle, others were forced out by some combination of ideological persecution, economic dislocation, and armed conflict. Wherever they ended up, the uprooted were forced to negotiate foreign and often hostile cultures and asylum practices.
While this momentous epoch has inspired much study, scholars have only recently drawn attention to the fact that the Age of Revolutions was also, inextricably, an age of both emigration (see, among others, Polasky 2023; Diaz 2021; Pestel 2019; Jansen 2018; Carpenter 2015; Jasanoff 2010) and re-migration (Summers 2024; Middelhoff 2021). Migrants were predominantly male, and have been studied as such, but they often brought or left behind networks of dependents including female relations, minors, servants and friends. Indeed, the navigation of gender norms and family relations were integral parts of the exilic experience. Drawing together historians and scholars of the literary, visual, and musical arts, this workshop aims to shed light on the least-visible members of these diasporas—women, children and servants—and to develop interdisciplinary perspectives on familial constellations of exile.
The following non-exhaustive list of questions relating to gender, social status and migration may serve as a guide for discussion at the interdisciplinary Workshop: Read more and source … (Web)