New workplaces and work cultures have grown in tandem with India’s consumer revolution, notably in the burgeoning interactive service sector. Here, the demands of customer service are reshaping the political subjectivity and democratic sensibility of the predominantly young workforce, stimulating a personalized, individualized, transactional, and clientelistic approach to politics in preference to collective action, while also unleashing a critique of class, power, and hierarchy.

Part of the Spring Seminar lecture series 2021.

This lecture will show how European perceptions of skin colour increasingly began to influence European perceptions of non-European ‘aliens’. Peter Burschel will argue that it was not until the sixteenth century that skin was seen as a ‘supra-individual’ distinguishing characteristic that made it possible to structure, classify, and, not least, to hierarchize intercultural encounters chromatically.

Part of the Autumn Seminar lecture series 2020.

The Gerda Henkel Foundation Visiting Professorship Lecture was given by Professor Martina Kessel, on Thursday, 26 November 2020.

An enduring problem in early medieval history is what to make of the legal material, which is abundant relative to the total surviving evidence (legislation, acts of practice, models, old texts, new texts), and paints extremely contradictory pictures of contemporary legal practices both within and across legal genres. The lecture will try to show that this level of contradiction results from people calling on many different legal and cultural frameworks for representing their own actions, all of which were potentially valid provided that they could be sold successfully to one’s audience: what mattered was success in getting others to play along through scene-setting and role-play.

Survivors of the Shoah have often described how the SS liked to define torturing practices during the genocide as ‘jokes’. The paper discusses the systematic presence of derisive laughter in Nazi Germany and analyzes its meanings as a way both to act out understandings of Germanness and to ‘justify’ violence.

The 2020 Annual Lecture 'The Crisis of the Meritocracy' was given by Professor Peter Mandler, Cambridge, on Friday, 6 November 2020.

Part of the Summer Seminar lecture series 2020 on Feminist Histories