How was the hand to be guided, the eye to be trained, the senses sharpened in preparing the child for an adult world? In princely Mysore in southern India, the missionaries, who took the initial steps in opening up education to wider circles than those entitled to forms of knowledge, and the Government efforts that followed were faced with new and complex challenges in a society wracked by the proscriptions of caste and gender. On the one hand, the classroom presented opportunities for ordering space and time, and for remaking bodies and habits in the process of building new skills.

But the classroom and the boarding school were perforce also sites of unlearning, of breaking down habits and prejudices relating to touch/sight, as well as older skills and styles of learning, in order to enable the modern educated subject to emerge. A small but suggestive body of visual and other records allows for speculation about the experience of schooling in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Mysore.

How can we unpack the history of schooling in colonial India by looking beyond official records of success and failure? How did the classroom in the Princely State of Mysore become a place where children and young adults unlearned traditional prejudices and picked up new sensory skills, which in turn shaped their understanding of their own selves in a modern world?

In this GHIL podcast interview PR Officer Kim König is joined by GHIL Senior Research Fellow and Head of the India Research Programme Indra Sengupta to talk to Janaki Nair about the ideas behind her lecture on ‘The Classroom as Sensorium: Tactility, Attention, and Perception in the Mysore School, 1860–1930’.

Why was the Enlightenment a turning point in the way in which humans think about climate? In what way did climate catastrophes affect revolutions and vice versa? How did climate politics emerge during this time?

In this GHIL podcast interview, Research Fellow for Colonial and Global History Mirjam Brusius and PR Officer Kim König, talk to Patrick Anthony about the research behind his GHIL lecture on Climate Crises and Politics in the Eighteenth Century.

Some scholars and scientists identify the Enlightenment as an inflection point in the Anthropocene, a geological age in which humans act as a planetary force. My talk suggests that this inflection point was characterized not only by new means and scales of environmental exploitation, but also by the emergence of climate politics. The naturalist Georg Forster provides a helpful itinerary through this time, from his study of Saxon hydraulics in the wake of the flood of 1784 to his death in Paris during the Terror of 1794. On either side of the Rhine, resource management and disaster mitigation constituted political power.

The ‘material Renaissance’, historians have argued, was an age of experimentation, and recipes were at the heart of this cultural movement. New collaborations between the humanities and the sciences allow for novel insights into Renaissance recipe cultures, and more specifically the degree of material experimentation and engagement by ‘recipe practitioners’. Scientific analysis and thorough historical contextualization of the chemical fingerprints of recipe users offer a new understanding of material cultures, medicine, and the history of the body in early modern Germany.

PR Officer Kim König and Research Fellow for Colonial and Global History Mirjam Brusius talk to Stefan Hanß about his research project which uses the scientific analysis and historical contextualization of the chemical fingerprints of Renaissance recipe users to offer a new understanding of material cultures, medicine, and the history of the body in early modern Germany.

Talks from the Symposium at the launch event for Behind the Wire, an exhibition on Internment durinf the First World War, held at the German Historical Institute, April-June, 2023. During the First World War, German civilians were interned as ‘enemy aliens’ in British Empire locations around the world. British citizens, white and non-white, were interned in Ruhleben camp near Berlin as a retaliatory measure, bringing the global experience of internment back to the German home front as well. For civilian internees across the world, long periods of isolation caused mental health problems in the form of the ‘barbed wire disease’. Humanitarian support came from the Spanish and the Swiss governments, as well as the Red Cross.

Many scholars have argued that historical concepts of the global are under-researched. In my talk, I will argue that filling this gap will mean taking a closer look at media representing global connections and differences. I will do this by presenting my research on American designer R. Buckminster Fuller and (West) German historian Arno Peters, both of whom rose to prominence as mediators of the global after the Second World War.

How did people in the past understand globalism? GHIL Research Fellow for Modern History Pascale Siegrist and PR Officer Kim König speak with David Kuchenbuch about his research on American designer R. Buckminster Fuller and the (West) German historian Arno Peters. David Kuchenbuch argues that their work as ‘Welt-Bildner’ (makers of worlds) points us to important shifts in twentieth-century political cultures as well as the way in which people understood their place in an interconnected world.

What is the employment contract? When was it introduced in India? What is the role of Indian labour history within the field of labour history and historical research more generally?

GHIL Senior Fellow and Head of the India Research Programme Indra Sengupta and PR Officer Kim König put these questions to Prabhu Mohapatra (University of Delhi) and talk to him about his research on the genealogy of labour regulation in India and the career of the employment contract in particular.