Matthias Middell
Abstract: While for a very long time professional historians focused on the reconstruction of the past a accurate as possible in more recent times processes of remembrance became of interest as well. The field of memory studies as a rather interdisciplinary one bringing historians in closer contact with cultural studies and social sciences. At the same time, memory studies are by their very nature transdisciplinary and historians face a challenge to develop both an analytical distance to remembrance and to engage with how the past is transformed into memory. Recent debates about geopolitical conflicts and how their underlying historical patterns are presented to the audience have caused dispute among historians as much as in the general public while at the same time there is need for the development of a historical culture in societies impacted by immigration and, as a consequence, the co-presence and interaction of different memories. The contribution will discuss along a few examples how different historiographies take up this challenge of an increasing complexity of the job of historians.
Bio: Dr. Matthias Middell is professor of cultural history at Leipzig University, earned his PhD in 1989 with a study on French counter-revolution at the end of the 18th century. His habilitation (2002) dealt with World History writing during the 20th century. He is director of the Research Centre Global Dynamics at Leipzig University and serves since 2022 as the University’s vice-president for Campus Development: Cooperation and Internationalisation. He is a board member of both the International Committee of Historians and the International Council for Philosophy and the Humanities. Among his most recent publications are: Intercultural Transfers and Processes of Spatialization (Leipzig 2021); Narrating World History after the Global Turn: The Cambridge World History (Leipzig 2020); Africa’s Global 1989 (Leipzig 2020); Empires reconfigured (Leipzig 2020); Gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt. Ein interdisziplinärer Dialog (Frankfurt 2020); The Practice of Global History. European Perspectives (London 2019); The Routledge Handbook of Transregional Studies (London, 2019); Re-spatializations under the Global Condition. Towards a typology of spatial formats (Berlin/ Boston 2019).
Affiliation: Leipzig University, Germany.
