Associate Fellows
Professor Gadi Algazi
Tel Aviv University, Israel
Arbeit, Haushalt und Lebensführung: Die Forma vitae der Humanisten im deutschsprachigen Raum, 1450-1630.
is professor of medieval history in the Department of History at the University of Tel Aviv, senior editor of the journal History & Memory, and member of the publishing collective for the journal Past & Present and Historische Anthropologie. He studied in Tel Aviv und Göttingen, was on the staff of the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, was a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His research encompasses, in particular, the social and cultural history of the late Middle Ages and early modern period, historical anthropology, colonial history, as well as the history, theories and methodologies of the social sciences.
At the International Research Center, Gadi Algazi will be writing a book on the rise of learned families and the scholarly habitus between 1450 and 1630. He will attempt to show the origins of a particular mode of life – a process that is especially well-documented in the case of scholars, above all in the sixteenth-century German-speaking world. Forms of work and family, income structures, and the daily routine will be newly figured. Methodologically speaking the project is at the interface between the history of science, gender history, historical research into the family, and the anthropology of early modern lifestyles.
Publications
‘Forget Memory. Some Critical Remarks on Memory, Forgetting and History’. In Damnatio in Memoria. Deformation und Gegenkonstruktionen in der Geschichte, edited by Sebastian Scholz, Gerald Schwedler, and Kai-Michael Sprenger, 25–34. Köln: Böhlau, 2014.
‘Middling Ages and Living Relics as Objects to Think With. Two Figures of the Historical Imagination’. In Modernity’s Classics, edited by Sarah C. Humphreys and Rudolf G. Wagner, 315–29. Berlin: Springer, 2013.
‘At the Study. Notes on the Production of the Scholarly Self’. In Space and Self in Early Modern European Cultures, edited by David Warren Sabean and Malina Stefanovska, 17–50. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
‘Johannes Keplers Apologie. Wissensproduktion, Selbstdarstellung und die Geschlechterordnung’. In Wissen, maßgeschneidert. Experten und Expertenkulturen im Europa der Vormoderne [= Historischen Zeitschrift // Beihefte (Neue Folge), 57], edited by Björn Reich, Frank Rexroth, and Matthias Roick, 215–49. München: Oldenbourg, 2012.
‘Bringing Kinship (Back) In’. Mediterranean Historical Review 25, no. 1 (2010): 83–92.
‘Habitus, familia und forma vitae. Die Lebensweisen mittelalterlicher Gelehrten in muslimischen, jüdischen und christlichen Gemeinden – vergleichend betrachtet’. In Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Gelehrten im späten Mittelalter, edited by Frank Rexroth, 185–217. Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2010.
with Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Jussen, eds. Negotiating the Gift. Pre-Modern Figurations of Exchange. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003.
Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im späten Mittelalter. Herrschaft, Gegenseitigkeit und Sprachgebrauch. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1996.
Last updated: February 8, 2016
Professor Josef Ehmer
Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria
Late to Work, Early to Retirement. The Long-Term Trends of Declining Labour Force Participation by Young and Elderly People. A Comparative Review.
teaches social and economic history at the University of Vienna. Before this he was professor for late-modern history at the University of Salzburg. Guest professorships took him to, among other places, the Free University Berlin, the European University Institute in Florence, and the University of Cambridge. His research encompasses the broad spectrum of European social history from the early modern period to the present day, some of his topics being work and the worker, the family and aging, historical demography and migration.
At the International Research Center, Josef Ehmer will be attempting to conceptually correlate two long historical trends – the increasingly late entry of young people into the field of gainful employment, and the increasingly early retirement of older individuals from the work world. Both trends have been well documented worldwide, but they have neither been sufficiently explained nor examined from a comparative perspective. Josef Ehmer is particularly interested in the interaction between three continuously changing factors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the structure of employment markets, the preferences of actors in terms of work and leisure time, and the alternatives to gainful employment through educational systems for younger people, pension systems for older individuals and family and domestic work for women.
Publications
‘Work and Workplaces’. In A Cultural History of Work in the Early Modern Age, edited by Bert de Munck and Thomas Max Safley, 3:67–87. A Cultural History of Work. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
‘Altersbilder und Konzeptionen des Alter(n)s im historisch-kulturellen Vergleich’. In Alternsforschung. Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Studium, edited by Karsten Hank, Frank Schulz-Nieswandt, Michael Wagner, and Susanne Zank, 19–45. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2019.
‘Zur Geschichte des Normalarbeitsverhältnisses. Rekonstruktion und Kritik’. In Normalarbeit. Nur Vergangenheit oder auch Zukunft?, edited by Johanna Muckenhuber, Josef Hödl, and Martin Griesbacher, 21–39. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018.
‘Kontextualisierung der Lebensgeschichten. Sozial-ökonomische Entwicklung Wiens 1850–1930’. In Marie Jahoda. Lebensgeschichtliche Protokolle der arbeitenden Klassen 1850–1930. Dissertation 1932, edited by Johann Bacher, Waltraud Kannonier-Finster, and Meinrad Ziegler, 215–51. Innsbruck ; Wien ; Bozen: Studienverlag, 2017.
‘Arbeitsdiskurse im deutschen Sprachraum des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts’. In Semantiken von Arbeit. Diachrone und vergleichende Perspektiven, edited by Jörn Leonhard and Willibald Steinmetz, 93–114. Köln: Böhlau, 2016.
‘Work versus Leisure. Historical Roots of the Dissociation of Work and Later Life in Twentieth-Century Europe’. In Challenges of Aging. Pensions, Retirement and Generational Justice, edited by Cornelius Torp, 135–64. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Last updated: January 23, 2020
Professor Alf Lüdtke
Universität Erfurt, Germany
War as Work. Young Adults in the German Wehrmacht during WWII
After completing his studies of history, philosophy, sociology and political science at the University of Tübingen Alf Lüdtke finished his M.A. in 1974. His PhD-dissertation (on state violence and policing in Prussia from 1800 to 1850) he concluded in 1980 at the University of Konstanz. His second dissertation (Habilitation; studies on work and “Eigensinn”) he completed in 1989 at the University of Hanover. From 1975 until his retirement in 2008 Lüdtke had a position as (Senior) Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen. In addition, in 1999 he took on a Professorship at the History Dept. of the University of Erfurt. After this engagement had also expired in 2008 the University of Erfurt granted him a Honorary Professorship. In the early 1990s Lüdtke substituted history chairs at the University of Düsseldorf (1989/90) and Greifswald (1992), respectively. Fellowships or Visiting Professorships he held at Princeton University (1981/82), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1992), University of Chicago (1993/94, 2003), University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1993; 1997; 2007), Université de Toulouse (2011), Hanyang University (Seoul, 2009 to 2013).
His project at re: work is entitled “War as Work. Young adults in the German Wehrmacht and in Allied forces during WWII”. Since the 1970s interest in the everyday of ordinary soldiers has grown rapidly. In turn, fresh research shed new light on war and war violence. Not only for German soldiers in WWII such investigations question the impact of ideology and other types of ‘belief’. Rather, they trace how everyday practices produce cooperation or, at least acceptance of a given task by people on all levels of hierarchy. They also show how rank and file obeyed orders yet still managed to carve out room of their own. Even more, this angle provides insight into the moulding of males (and females) into people who are ready to kill and ready to cope with the risk to be killed. His point is that the work of soldiering fostered pride of good workmanship which, in turn, ‘normalized’ the act of killing. In other words: these studies show ‘doing war’ as work.
A second dimension pertains the dynamics of age and life-course of the military personnel. Combat units tend to be staffed by young adults while rearguard or occupation units are manned by males (and female auxiliaries) in their thirties if not forties (oftentimes married and parents). What is the importance of age in either case? Moreover, to what extent did survivors of WWI receive or claim special attention when joining the military in the 1930s and ´40s? And in the German case: were they met with contempt for ‘their’ defeat in 1918?
Alf Lüdtke has explored various topics and fields:
1) state and state violence, yet also the whole range of violent behavior.
2) practices and experiences of work – his particular focus is on industrial work and the ways people appropriate a given situation and remold or accept it in ways of their own. From here he pursued the notion of people's self-will ("Eigensinn").
3) the visual caught his eye early on, esp. the potential of a "visual history" triggered studies on industrial photography and nourishes a strong interest in the interrelationships or resonances between the textual and the visual.
4) range and impact of the multiple facets of people's everyday: thus, Alltagsgeschichte and in particular the overlaps with ethnography are focal.
5) debates on "Provincializing Europe" (D. Chakrabarty) stimulated his interest in re-situating crucial notions like "domination" or "work" and to trace their trans- or international trajectories. A recent five-year stint at Hanyang University, Seoul/Korea has greatly contributed to this effort.
Publications
Lüdtke, Alf, ed. 1989. Alltagsgeschichte. Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen. Frankfurt: Campus.
Lüdtke, Alf. , ed. 1991. Herrschaft als soziale Praxis. Historische und sozial-anthropologische Studien. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Lüdtke, Alf. 1993. Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus. Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag.
Lüdtke, Alf. 2010. “Soldiering and Working. Almost the Same? Reviewing Practices in Industry and the Military in Twentieth-Century Contexts.” In Work in a Modern Society. The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective, edited by Jürgen Kocka, 109–30. New York: Berghahn Books.
Lüdtke, Alf. 2011. “Male Bodies. Well Trained Muscles or Beer Bellies? From the ‘Master Race’ in Nazism to the Ruling Class in East Germany.” In Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship. Global Perspectives, edited by Jie-Hyun Lim and Karen Petrone, 142–68. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Professor Alain Supiot
Collège de France, Paris, France
Publications
La Solidarité. Enquête sur un principe juridique, ed. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2015.
with Mireille Delmas-Marty, eds. Prendre la responsabilité au sérieux. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2015.
Grandeur et misère de l’État social. Leçon inaugurale prononcée le jeudi 29 novembre 2012. Paris: Fayard, 2013.
‘L’idée de justice sociale’. In La justice sociale saisie par les juges en Europe, edited by Laurence Burgorgue-Larsen, 4:5–30. Cahiers européens. Paris: Pedone, 2013.
‘The Public-Private Relation in the Context of Today’s Refeudalization’. International Journal of Constitutional Law 11, no. 1 (2013): 129–45.
‘Fragments d’une politique législative du travail’. Droit social, no. 12 (2011): 1151–61.
L’esprit de Philadelphie. La justice sociale face au Marché total. Paris: Seuil, 2010.
‘Contribution à une analyse juridique de la crise économique de 2008’. Revue internationale du Travail 149, no. 2 (2010): 165–76.
Homo juridicus. Essai sur la fonction anthropologique du Droit. 1st ed. «La couleur des idées». Paris: Seuil, 2005.
Last updated: February 8, 2016