Research Projects

The DFG Network brings together historians with scholars from neighbouring disciplines to put work in the cultural economy in a historical perspective. The initiative identifies two gaps in existing research: On the one hand, while “creative labour” has attracted considerable attention of social scientists in the past twenty-five years, their research is noticeably presentist. The first aim of the network is to address this presentism by historicising both cultural work and its study. On the other hand, historians have largely neglected work in the cultural sector. Studying work in the contemporary cultural economy since its emergence in the late nineteenth century from diverse angles, the second aim of the network is to establish a field in the historiographical debate that heeds the demands of a new labour history and promises important insights into post-industrial work more generally.

Network activities begin in spring 2023. Five workshops will be held in the next three years to discuss the ethics of cultural work, collective self-organization, copyright issues, the role of the state, processes of transnationalization and overall historical narratives.

The Center for Cultural Research (ZfKf) emerged from a SPIEGEL institute in 1972 and produced the so-called "Künstlerreport" in the 1970s, among other things. The ZfKf was a pioneer in the development of empirical cultural research and the cultural policy association landscape in Germany. After making personal contact with the long-standing director of the ZfKf, Prof. Andreas Wiesand, the archive of the center, which has no longer existed in this form since 2009, was thankfully transferred to the archive of the Institute of Contemporary History in 2023. The cooperation enables the rapid indexing of the collection and thus ensures access for various research projects within the framework of the DFG network "Towards a History of Work", including Wibke Rhein's doctoral project on free artists in the FRG.

Infrastructures rarely come to mind while making or listening to music. As an ephemeral and affective experience, music of whatever origin is difficult to capture, locate, and pin down. And yet, without the emergence, development, transformation, and deterioration of infrastructures since the 19^th century, such experiences would have taken quite a different path. Drawing on recent developments in the history of music – including praxeological approaches, cultural diplomacy studies, and global historical perspectives more generally –, this workshop delves into the material and entangled conditions as well as the explicit and implicit prerequisites of making music at a transnational and global level. We assume that the presence (or lack) of infrastructures was closely linked to the production conditions of musical culture, which pilots us to issues of law and regulation, industry and organisation structures, technology and media, transportation, occupational careers, and markets. Likewise, we suppose a strong connection between musical infrastructures and the formation of musical meanings and patterns of musical reception. Overall, thinking through the lens of musical infrastructures will readdress the role of both public and private institutions in the (un-)making of global musical life and at the same time shed new light on the changing topography of cultural globalisation since 1850 more generally, including its peaks, halts, and reversions.

"Infrastructures of musical globalization" is a joint project with Dr Friedemann Pestel. It is based on a workshop which was hosted by the KHK global dis:connect and took place in June 2022 at the Historisches Kolleg, Munich. A Publication is in preparation.

The planned anthology “African Voices in Global Intellectual History” will assemble original documents from African public figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. African perspectives remain particularly unacknowledged in intellectual history and are frequently reduced to topics perceived as typically “African”, such as Black nationalism, anticolonialism and antiracism. Against this backdrop, the anthology, which will feature concise commentaries to each document, gives voice to Africans within the thriving field of global intellectual history and may prompt new research. The reader explicitly aims at a multifaceted application in teaching; seminars on African history should be able to profit from it just as much as courses on the global history of ideas and on other topics of global history.

This project offers a new interpretation of the Historical School of Political Economy (Nationalökonomie) as it emerged in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century. It examines how, according to its founders, the Historical School was to push forward a modern thinking of development that was historical, empirical, relativistic and interventionist, ultimately pointing to an open and bright future. Representatives of the Historical School were primarily concerned with the economy and society of their own nation state. By comparing nation states, advocates of the Historical School sought to better understand local and national problems. Still, development was not a purely European or Western project. Rather, the reception of the Historical School has to be read as a "global moment" in which economists, social reformers and politicians in many parts of the world appropriated the idea of development in a relatively short period of time between 1880 and 1914 as a central concept of economic thought. Relativistic thinking about economic development had long been locally anchored when development economics, starting in the 1940s, once again challenged the so-called ‘monoeconomics’ claim.

Partial results of this project have now been published as an article in the European Review of History. It shows that the International Statistical Institute served as a central international platform for representatives of the Historical School to disseminate ideas of measurable socio-economic development. At the same time, this assigns the Institute and the Historical School an appropriate place in the history of ideas of development thinking.

This book project investigates the changing relationships between military music and society from the French Revolution to the Age of Empire in a global perspective. As an institution, military music constituted a vital part of musical life in the course of this period. It contributed to the improvement of musical instruments and to the professionalization of the trade as much as it influenced the development of both art music and popular music. Finally, the military became an important player in the dissemination and appropriation of music all over the world. Tracing these developments, the study not only offers new perspectives on the history of music. It also contributes to the field of global social history by revealing the differentiated commonalities of civil-military relations in the long nineteenth century.

Beethoven and his music resounds throughout the land. In 2020, the entire world will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the composer. True friends of Beethoven have found out that today, no other name is so frequently used in street names and places worldwide than that of their hero. For them, it is without question that Beethoven’s music is known all over the world, and his music is played everywhere. It seems like the universal ambitions expressed in Beethoven’s music have finally matched with a truly global reception, thus making the child of Bonn a ubiquitous global phenomenon and a cultural heritage for the whole of mankind. Against this backdrop, and following a global historical perspective, this depiction is put to an empirical test in several projects. As a follow up to my talk at the BTHVN Perspectives Symposion in Bonn in February 2020, my contribution to the edited volume proposes an analytical framework which helps to explain why the global reception of Beethoven has been much more uneven than currently maintained by the media and jubilee actions. Together with students from the University Konstanz, we produced a podcast series on Provincializing Beethoven. Another article is in preparation which for the first time will shed light on the history of Beethoven's reception in Africa.

Projektbeschreibung

Focusing on central themes and key developments of European musical life in the long twentieth century, this handbook introduces its readers to recent trends and methods of an interdisciplinary music historiography. It takes up Christopher Small's concept of “musicking” to look at "music" as a range of practices, from composing, performing, listening and dancing, to publishing, reviewing, marketing, and instrumentalizing. The handbook is the first to appear in the new series "Comtemporary European History", published by De Gruyter and edited by Matthias Middell and Corinna Unger. Starting from their own disciplinary and area expertise, renowned authors from Europe and the United States reveal transnational connections and comparative insights which collectively lead to a new, multifaceted picture of European musical life in the twentieth century.

The nineteenth century, jammed between the classic, European-dominated age of Enlightenment and the cosmopolitan condition of the late twentieth century, figures less prominently in scholarship on cosmopolitanism. Despite the century’s central place in the emergence of an increasingly connected world, scholars seem to be little inclined to see cosmopolitanism as a feature of an age shaped by high imperialism, nationalism, and racial thinking. The special issue, which results from a symposium on Cosmpolitanisms funded by the VolkswagenStiftung, sets out to change this picture and to delineate a variety of cosmopolitan practices during a supposedly “un-cosmopolitan” period. In fact, the nineteenth century proves a particularly apt case for a critical reassessment of cosmopolitanism and for the study of its complex relationship with unfolding empires and emerging nation-states in different geographic contexts.

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