Research group “Society”

This project systematically investigates the connections between socialist-communist underground work and women's networks under Nazi occupation along the transregional European flight routes (Soviet Union, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, France).

Starting with the first World's Fair in London (1851) and continuing through Paris (1867, 1889, 1900), Vienna (1873), and Chicago (1893) to the World's Fairs of the interwar period in Barcelona (1929) and Paris (1937), this project analyzes how world exhibitions influenced the development and representation of statehood and how political change between imperial and national order affected the forms of representation of statehood.

The galley was the most important boat type in the Mediterranean world since antiquity, both for warfare and the transport of goods. But it was not until the 1500s that governments began to use convicted criminals as oarsmen. Remarkably, this trend also reached countries that had no galley fleets themselves such as the Holy Roman Empire.

This project studies the emerging science of botanical geography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states, bringing together approaches from cultural history, political history, and the history of science.

The research project examines the media coverage of natural disasters as cross-border moments of reflection and mobilisation in (Western) Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Instead of focussing on single extreme events (with the climax of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755), as is common in historical disaster research, the project aims to show the longer-term formation and transformation of disaster discourses across territorial and linguistic borders. Printed works in German, English, French, Italian and Latin will be analysed that deal in textual and visual form with extreme natural events (earthquakes and floods) in the respective other countries or language areas. The hypothesis is that an early modern European media culture of disaster emerged through societal teleconnections produced by the media.

In the 1820s, a British pharmacist developed the first match, replacing highly flammable phosphorus and sulphur-containing matches. A Swedish chemist perfected the technology and invented a new match in the 1840s: the safety match. While sulphur and white phosphorus had previously played a prominent role in the production of matches, the safety matches used the much less dangerous red phosphorus and potassium chlorate.

In order to overcome the binary opposition of European and Ottoman diplomacy, this project examined the meaning of difference within everyday diplomacy (mainly English) in early modern Istanbul.

This project reconstructs the significance that legal-bureaucratic practices of categorization had for the production and establishment of global categories of persons, using the history of the "refugee" as an example. Our hypothesis is that between 1944 and 1951, in conjunction with and flexible self-representations of people in transit, international organizations expanded upon, replaced, and ultimately left behind the situational category of "Displaced Person" (DP). The project combines a multi-perspective approach with an analysis of local, international, and state practices of distinguishing between humans beyond the nation state, and thus further develops a socio-cultural approach for researching the historical interplay of mobility and belonging.

The research consortium founded in 2021 investigates the question of what value the past holds for earlier and contemporary societies. A focal point in the second funding phase concerns current debates on climate change, on the postcolonial responsibility of the Western world, on the use of the past in the growing right-wing populism, and on the historical legitimization of war.

Since 1 July 2021, the German Research Foundation has been funding the Collaborative Research Centre 1482 "Human Differentiation" of the JGU Mainz and the IEG. This collaborative project focuses on the research question of how historical and contemporary societies categorise their members, separate them spatially and thus suggest different social affiliations. Human differentiation is to be explicated as a form of cultural differentiation and its connection with forms of social and societal differentiation is to be decoded.

The project focuses on one of the most productive field sites of wildlife research during the 1960s and 1970s, the Serengeti Research Institute in post-colonial Tanzania. It analyses how the scientific study of the national park’s animal species through ethologists and ecologists was interrelated with the postcolonial renegotiation of social relationships within the Institute as well as around the Serengeti National Park and in Tanzania. In particular, the project examines the practice of wildlife research and its transformation into scientific publications as well as into popularizing books and films; it traces the postcolonial "Africanisation" of the Institute and its impact upon social relations and scientific practices at the Institute, and it is interested in how far the institute's production of scientific knowledge legitimized the spatial and social politics of the National Park.

Funded by the SFB 1482 - Human Categorisation. The project understands comparative behavioural research as a central instance of dealing with the guiding difference between humans and animals in the 20th century. Using the example of the Serengeti Research Institute in Tanzania, East Africa, founded in 1965, it examines knowledge production, practice and politics of behavioural research on free-living large mammals. It examines the forms and media of objectification and anthropomorphisation of the animal as a research object, the transformation of formerly racialised categories of difference in the course of the postcolonial "Africanisation" of the institute, and the spatial differentiation and politics of order between humans and animals as a consequence of the institute's knowledge production.

Das Projekt vergleicht die osmanische und die spanische Expansionsgeschichte in der Frühen Neuzeit und deren jeweiligen Ort im historischen Gedächtnis bis in die Gegenwart. Es ist Teil des Leibniz-Forschungsverbundes "Wert der Vergangenheit", Lab 2.1. "Dynamische Räume" (2021-2025).

As an internationally intertwined part of the British Empire, the Arab world, the Islamic reform movement and the (post-)Ottoman region, Egypt was a meeting point for both mobile actors and globally circulating concepts at the beginning of the 20th century. Against this background, the IEG project, which is part of the Leibniz cooperation project HISDEMAB, investigated how global concepts of health and nationalization policy were implemented in local contexts, whereby differently mobile actors renegotiated their affiliation to modernity, but also to their local context.

Egypt became the main center of Arabic literary production and Islamic reform at the end of the nineteenth century. Various actors freely discussed the meanings of democracy, secularism, and independence as well as the significance of diverse cultural and religious identities. In the national independence movement and the political system, a secular consensus prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century. However, the 1929 Egyptian Nationality Law stipulated that only a person whose family had lived in Egypt since 1848 without interruption was an Egyptian. Thus, it discriminated against mobile Jewish, Greek, Italian, Armenian, and Syrian minorities, residing in Egypt since Ottoman times. By discussing the scope and limits of such concepts as democracy, secularism and citizenship in public debates, the research project aimed to take a fresh look at the emergence of modern Egypt.

Ziel des WissenschaftsCampus Mainz / Frankfurt ist es, eine breite Plattform für interdisziplinäre Byzanz­forschung institutionell zu etablieren. Beteiligt sind alle Fächer, die zur Erforschung des Byzantinischen Reichs und seiner Kultur beitragen bzw. beitragen können.

There were many urgent discussions across Europe in the wake of the Second World War about the need to build new, “modern” societies. Christians – whether they were clergy or lay intellectuals – played active roles in such debates and sought ways of bringing the aims and practices of post-war social reconstruction in line with their faith. Tendencies towards secularisation in this period were often accompanied by principles that stood in competition with Christian worldviews, such as a faith in science and technology, a commitment to individualism and personal fulfilment, and the ideologies of the Cold War.

This project considers the Polish-German workers, mainly from the eastern parts of Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and the Russian Empire, who moved to the Ruhr Valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Extrapolating from this case study, it elaborates on a history of European societies through the lens of mobility and conflicts over multiple belonging. The history of mobile people is so closely linked to that of society in the Ruhr and the transformation of European empires that they can only be understood in their multifaceted relationships and interactions. From a methodological point of view, the project aims to contribute to the reconceptualisation of societies, starting from mobility and difference.

Das Projekt geht dem Zusammenhang zwischen Mobilität und Differenzierung aus akteurszentrierter Perspektive nach. Im Mittelpunkt stehen mobile Akteure unterschiedlicher Herkunft, welche die von den spanischen Obrigkeiten gezogenen räumlichen und politisch-rechtlichen Grenzen überschritten. Wie wirkten sich Praktiken der Grenzüberschreitung auf die Konstruktion von Identitäten und Zugehörigkeiten aus?

In regard to the lives of German revolutionary emigres after 1848/49 this research project moves beyond the dominant interpretations in conceptual and national historiography in three ways: First, it conceptualizes their transnational lives as biographies of migration and explains the actors’ self-understanding and agency via experiences of transatlantic mobility. In so doing, the project connects explicitly to the interdisciplinary research field of mobility studies. Second, it analyzes the social, economic, and cultural foundations of the process of mobility. In this context, it emphasizes the central importance of family networks for shaping the actors’ agency and thereby transcends established post-revolutionary turning points, such as the American Civil War or the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. Third, it takes the emigres’ children into account: On the one hand, this opens up an enhanced perspective on the history of the influence the revolution had over a longer period of time. On the other hand, it explains its transatlantic legacies beyond the categories of flight, exile, or return.

Migration made Istanbul an imperial capital and one of the most diverse cities in the early modern world. After the Ottoman conquest in 1453, the sultans repopulated the city by bringing in people from the provinces, prisoners of war from the Balkans to Iran, and slaves from Eastern Europe. Istanbul then became a safe haven for Spanish Jews and, from the late sixteenth century, took in a large number of refugees from Anatolia. As the capital of a world empire, the city also drew in students, career-seekers, merchants, and a growing number of labor workers from the Balkans, Anatolia, and other distant places. The migrants not only formed a significant part of the population but also held key positions in the city’s imperial institutions and dominated important sectors of urban life.

The project was carried out at the IEG from 2014 – 2024. Making and Becoming "New (Wo)Men" enquired into the history of social experiments in industrial capitalism. It studied private-industry planning, subjective appropriation and urban materiality in the Czechoslovak industrial town of Zlín and the shoe company Baťa.

Bernhard Gissibl’s postdoctoral research project analyses the growth and development of the foreign correspondents’ network of both German states during the decades of the Cold War.

The project examines the antislavery discourse in the period spanning the end of the ancien régime and the beginning of the modern period and focuses on the Spanish-speaking world. Although Spanish-language authors voiced criticism of slavery as early as the sixteenth century, abolitionism as a political movement made its present felt very late on the Iberian Peninsula. Spain was among the last colonial powers to abolish slavery in its overseas possessions.