Fellows 2012/2013
Dr. Yavuz Aykan
École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, France
Between Person and Property: Towards a Socio-Legal History of the Slave Mother in Early Modern Ottoman Society
received his BA in history education at Dokuz Eylül University in Izmir, Turkey. He continued his studies at Bogaziçi University’s Department of History in Istanbul and obtained his MA in history. He then pursued his doctoral studies in Paris, France, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and completed his Thèse de doctorat nouveau régime entitled Les acteurs de la justice à Amid et dans la province du Diyarbekir d’après les sicil provinciaux du 18e siècle, under the direction of Professor Gilles Veinstein. Before becoming a fellow at re:work, he taught a variety of language and history courses at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. His current research focuses on the construction of “types of persons” in Islamic legal doctrine and their operation at the level of the social from the 14th to the 18th century.
His research project at re:work examines domestic slavery in the wider context of slave-labour in early modern Ottoman society. Through the prism of a legal concept discussed by Muslim jurists as “mother of the child” (umm al-walad), his project focuses on the doctrinal constructions of the categories governing labour in Islamic jurisprudence and their operation at the level of daily and economic life in the Ottoman empire. With regard to the specification of the rights proper accorded to the category of umm al-walad, it examines doctrinal models of persons and things through which exploitation of labour is articulated and legitimized in Islamic jurisprudence. This necessitates a reading of Ottoman jurisprudential debates with regard to umm al-walad in the larger evolving context of Islamic jurisprudence as well as that of the norms’ sociological raison d’être through kinship, labour and lifecycles. As such, his project attempts to trace the particular stories of women who are (or claim to be) umm al-walad before the Ottoman legal courts by drawing on the rich corpus of Ottoman court records.
Publications
‘Property Between Life and Death. A Legal Debate Over the Property of a Missing Person (gâib) in Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Amid’. In Justice and Statecraft. New Ottoman Legal History, edited by Huri İslamoğlu and Safa Saraçoğlu. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, forthcoming.
Rendre la justice à Amid. Procedures, acteurs et doctrines dans le contexte ottoman du XVIIIème siècle. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
‘Comment al-hajj Mehmet s’est-il approprié un terrain récupéré à la suite de la décrue du Tigre? Le statut d’une terre vacante (arz-ı mübâha) devant un tribunal ottoman (Amid au XVIIIe siècle)’. In Appartenance locale et propriété au nord et au sud de la Méditerranée, edited by Sami Bargaoui, Cerutti Simona, and Isabelle Grangaud. Aix-en-Provence: IREMAM, 2015.
‘Mariage’. In Dictionnaire de l’Empire Ottoman, edited by François Georgeon, Nicolas Vatin, and Gilles Veinstein. Paris: Fayard, 2015.
‘Unacknowledged Memory. The Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire and the Ambivalence of National Memory in the Turkish Republic’. In Remembering the Past in Iranian Societies, edited by Christine Allison and Philip G. Kreyenbroek, 78–94. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013.
Last updated: April 25, 2016
Professor Sidney Chalhoub
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil
is professor of history at the University of Campinas, Brazil, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago, and a visiting scholar at Stanford University.
The starting point of his current research is a law enacted on November 7, 1831, that prohibited the African slave trade to Brazil. It declared free all Africans brought into the country after that date and established legal sanctions that could be applied to traffickers and to people who bought captives while aware of their origins in the illegal trade. The Brazilian parliament passed the bill because of pressure from the British government; however, it seems that the authorities never intended to enforce the law, and it faced opposition from the planter class, which was soon to become even stronger as a result of the expansion of coffee cultivation in the south-eastern provinces of the Empire. From the early 1830s to the early 1850s (when the slave trade actually came to an end after the enactment of a new law) more than 750 thousand Africans are deemed to have been smuggled into the country.
Non-compliance with the law entailed the emergence of a number of social practices to substantiate the customary seigneurial right to enslave Africans smuggled into the country, and their Brazilian-born descendants. To achieve this objective slaveholders relied on the cautious consent of successive governments and the overt cooperation of local officials; furthermore, the notion that blacks were to be seen and treated as slaves unless clear evidence proved otherwise became firmly established and operative in daily life.
Illegal enslavement and the precariousness of freedom belonged to the same historical process. In nineteenth-century Brazilian society no African, or Brazilian-born descendant of Africans – black or pardo (mulatto), free or freed – remained secure against threats to his or her liberty originating in the customary seigneurial right to reduce people to slavery regardless of the law. Chalhoub seeks to observe both the modes of action pertaining to public authorities, which meant the recognition of the seigneurial right to enslave illegally, and the ways in which freed Africans and their Brazilian descendants dealt with this situation.
Publications
‘The Politics of Ambiguity’. In Global Histories of Work, edited by Andreas Eckert, 183–214. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016.
‘The Politics of Ambiguity. Conditional Manumission, Labor Contracts, and Slave Emancipation in Brazil (1850s–1888)’. International Review of Social History 60, no. 2 (2015): 161–91.
A força da escravidão. Ilegalidade e costume no Brasil oitocentista. São Paulo, SP: Editora Schwarcz, 2012.
‘Solidarité et liberté. Les sociétés de secours mutuel pour gens de couleur à Rio de Janeiro dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle’. In Brésil, quatre siècles d’esclavage. Nouvelles questions, nouvelles recherches, edited by Jean Hébrard, 283–307. Paris: Karthala, 2012.
‘The Precariousness of Freedom in a Slave Society (Brazil in the Nineteenth Century)’. International Review of Social History 56, no. 3 (2011): 405–39.
‘Illegal Enslavement and the Precariousness of Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Brazil’. In Assumed Identities. The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World, edited by John D. Garrigus and Christopher Morris, 88–115. Arlington, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2010.
‘Costumes senhoriais. Eescravização ilegal e precarização da liberdade no Brasil império’. In Trabalhadores na cidade. Cotidiano e cultura no Rio de Janeiro e em São Paulo, séculos XIX e XX, edited by Elciene Azevedo, 23–62. Campinas, SP: Editora Unicamp, 2009.
‘The Politics of Silence. Race and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil’. Slavery & Abolition 27, no. 1 (2006): 73–87.
Machado de Assis, historiador. São Paulo, SP: Companhia das Letras, 2003.
‘What Are Noses for? Paternalism, Social Darwinism and Race Science in Machado de Assis’. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2001): 171–91.
Visões da liberdade. Uma história das últimas décadas da escravidão na corte. São Paulo, SP: Companhia das Letras, 1990.
Last updated: October 19, 2016
Dr. Olivier Giraud
Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris, France
is research fellow at the Lise-CNRS, part of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris. He is a political scientist and sociologist and works in the field of comparative policy analysis. He has been involved in several research programs dealing with the analysis of employment or training policies in various European countries. For a few years now, he has worked on the comparative analysis of local care regimes. Showing how national or regional care policies are reframed or complemented at the local level by various kinds of private or public discourses and service provision, he has shown how these local care arrangements frame men’s and even more women’s life courses and social roles. He is also interested in the theory of comparative analysis in the social sciences: infranational comparisons, and comparisons of most different cases, etc.
His project at re:work focuses on the analysis of the transformation of employment norms in a broad perspective (Brazil, France, United States) in the context of globalization. This research looks specifically at the way employment norms are increasingly developing in a ‘grey zone’, mixing various systems of reference norms, and becoming ever more ambiguous and indefinite. Involving French, American, Brazilian and Mexican colleagues, the project looks simultaneously at the dynamics of remuneration modes, temporal norms, the transformation of hierarchy and autonomy, emerging figures of the grey zones of employment and at the methodological dimension of this kind of comparative work.
Publications
‘La protection sociale et les échelles de l’action publique. Pour un cadre comparatif renouvelé’. In Les territoires vécus de l’intervention sociale, edited by Maryse Bresson, Fabrice Colomb, and Jean-François Gaspar, 37–48. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2015.
with Martino Maggetti. ‘Methodological Pluralism’. In Comparative Politics. Theoretical and Methodological Challenges, edited by Dietmar Braun and Martino Maggetti, 125–53. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2015.
Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches: ‘Citoyennetés recomposées dans la protection sociale – pour une approche scalaire des régimes d’action publique’. Aix-Marseille Université, 2014.
with Thays Wolfarth Mossi, Frédéric Rey, and Cinara Lerrer Rosenfield. ‘Les normes d’emploi au défi de l’auto-entreprenariat et des micro-entreprises individuelles. Une comparaison France – Brésil’. Tiers Monde, no. 218 (2014): 35–52.
with Didier Demazière, and Michel Lallement. ‘Comparer. Options et inflexions d’une pratique de recherche’. Sociologie du travail 55, no. 2 (2013): 136–51.
with Arnaud Lechevalier. ‘Les femmes au cœur de l’éclatement de la norme d’emploi en Allemagne’. Travail, genre et sociétés, no. 30 (2013): 189–94.
‘Les défis de la comparaison à l’âge de la globalisation. Pour une approche centrée sur les cas les plus différents inspirée de Clifford Geertz’. Critique internationale 57, no. 4 (2012): 89–110.
‘Decentralization in France and India. A Comparison’. In Indo-French Perspectives on Local Government and Democracy, edited by Lucy Baugnet and Girish Kumar, 165–87. New Delhi: Manohar, 2011.
Fédéralisme et relations industrielles dans l’action publique en Allemagne. La formation professionnelle entre homogénéités et concurrences. Paris: Harmattan, 2003.
Last updated: April 26, 2016
Dr. Milena Kremakova
Warwick University, UK
https://soziologie.uni-halle.de/professuren/bildung/kremakova/
Milena’s research interests include post-socialist transformations in Eastern Europe more widely, and the interplay of local and global mechanisms and conventions on the labour market. She is particularly interested in maritime labour and coastal communities worldwide. Further academic interests include the public role of sociology, research methodologies (especially ethnography, oral history, visual research methods), and (incidentally) the sociology of mathematics. With Warwick PhD student Mark Carrigan, Milena co-edits the Online magazine The Sociological Imagination (www.sociologicalimagination.org), for which she also writes her own column.
At re:work, Milena will be working to extend her research further afield in post-socialist Eastern Europe to a comparative transnational study of Bulgarian and Ukrainian maritime livelihoods. It will examine how individual life-courses, career paths and vocational identities on the waterfront were reshaped after the formerly state-run industries of the two countries became part of the global market of maritime labour. The study will use oral histories gathered through in-person and online interviews. By analysing working lives in a dynamic ex-socialist industry in two different post-socialist scenarios, this research aims to contribute to the understanding of post-socialist labour markets, issues related to the quality of maritime labour, diverging national pathways out of state socialism, as well as global mechanisms and the effects of labour marketisation. The maritime labour market is a global industry that transcends national and continental borders; this calls for concerted supra-national policies to better safeguard working conditions and improve the well-being of workers and local communities.
Publications
Sea Change. How Bulgarian Seafarers Became Global Market Agents. Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming.
‘The “New Spirit of Academic Capitalism.” Can Scientists Create Generative Critique from Within?’ Teorie Vědy / Theory of Science XXXVIII, no. 1 (2016): 27–51.
‘Trust, Access, and Diverging Notions of “Public” and “Private”. A Returning Insider’s Experience of Research in Bulgaria’. Sociological Research Online 19, no. 4 (2014): 12.
‘Too Soft for Economics, Too Rigid for Sociology, or Just Right? The Productive Ambiguities of Sen’s Capability Approach’. European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie 54, no. 3 (2013): 393–419.
‘What Do Market Mechanisms (Really) Mean? A Study of Maritime Livelihoods after 1989’. In Rethinking Work. Global Historical and Sociological Perspectives, edited by Rana P. Behal, Alice Mah, and Babacar Fall, 55–72. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2011.
Last updated: April 26, 2016
Professor Carola Lentz
Universität Mainz, Germany
is professor of social anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. Since 1987, she has been conducting research on labour migration, ethnicity, the history of chieftaincy, land rights, and the politics of belonging in Northern Ghana and Burkina Faso.
Her current research project explores the changing career strategies and home ties of the members of an emerging middle class in Northern Ghana. She also supervises a group of junior researchers who are studying the 2010 African independence celebrations of nine different countries.
In autumn 2011, she was appointed president of the German Anthropological Association.
Furthermore she received the prestigous 2014 Melville J. Herskovits Award for her study Land, Mobility, and Belonging in the West African Savanna (Indiana University Press). The African Studies Association presents the Herskovits Award to the author of the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English during the preceding year.
Publications
Familie, Arbeit und soziale Mobilität. Ghanaische Perspektiven. Vol. 4. Re:work Lectures. Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2020.
with David Lowe. Remembering Independence. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.
‘Culture: The Making, Unmaking and Remaking of an Anthropological Concept’. Zeitschrift Für Ethnologie 142, no. 2 (2017): 181–204.
‘African Middle Classes. Lessons from Transnational Studies and a Research Agenda’. In The Rise of Africa’s Middle Class. Myths, Realities and Critical Engagements, edited by Henning Melber, 17–53. London: Zed Books, 2016.
‘“I Take an Oath to the State, Not the Government.” Career Trajectories and Professional Ethics of Ghanaian Public Servants’. In States at Work. Dynamics of African Bureaucracies, edited by Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, 175–204. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa. Natives and Strangers. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013.
Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Last updated: June 4, 2020
Professor Peter Mark
Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA
is professor of African art history at Wesleyan University. Since 1972 he has used the complementary fields of history and art history to study the cultural history of West Africa (focusing on Greater Senegambia). He also concentrates on early contact between Europeans and West Africans, using material culture to elucidate and illustrate the complex relationships and attitudes that developed between diverse peoples and cultures from the late fifteenth15th to the 17th century. He has published monographs on the history of the Jola people of Senegal, on the history of masking traditions in southern Senegal (Casamance), and on Luso-African culture and architecture. Together with Professor José da Silva Horta (University of Lisbon) he has published The Forgotten Diaspora, a history of 17th-century Jewish merchants who settled in Senegambia.
His project at the center looks at both the trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic 16th and 17th-century commerce in blade weapons that linked weapons producers in North Africa, Europe, and even the Indian Ocean to West Africa. How did this trade complement and stimulate weapons production by local blacksmiths? How did producers (of raw materials, via mining and) of weapons, manage to track and respond to the changing demand that existed on a global scale for the products of their labour? How did African artisans decide which imported products to rework? A close study of two groups of objects – surviving blade weapons and contemporary artistic depictions of the cavalrymen who used the swords – may illustrate the process of production by the Africans who re-fashioned the swords.
Publications
‘Ransoming, Collateral, and Protective Captivity on the Upper Guinea Coast Before 1650. Colonial Continuities, Contemporary Echoes’. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Papers, no. 193 (2018): 1–16.
‘“Bini, Vidi, Vici” – On the Misuse of “Style” in the Analysis of Sixteenth Century Luso-African Ivories’. History in Africa 42 (2015): 323–34.
‘African Meanings and European-African Discourse. Iconography and Semantics in Seventeenth Century Salt Cellars from Serra Leoa’. In Religion and Trade. Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000-1900, edited by Francesca Trivellato, Leor Halevi, and Cátia Antunes, 236–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
with José da Silva Horta. ‘Being Both Free and Unfree. The Case of Selected Luso-Africans in 16th and 17th Century Western Africa. Sephardim in a Luso-African Context’. Anais de História de Além-Mar XIV (2013): 225–48.
The Forgotten Diaspora. Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
The Wild Bull and the Sacred Forest. Form, Meaning, and Change in Senegambian Initiation Masks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [1992].
‘Two Early Seventeenth-Century Sephardic Communities on Senegal’s Petite Côte’. History in Africa 31 (2004): 231–56.
‘Portuguese’ Style and Luso-African Identity. Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Last updated: April 16, 2019
Professor Mary Jo Maynes
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
has long been interested in the social and cultural history of class and gender relations in Modern Europe, as well as the history of family and generational relations. A second area of interest is world history, and especially on links between the household and global dynamics.
During her time at re:work she will be working collaboratively with Professor Ann Waltner. The project focuses on young women’s transition to adulthood in China and Western Europe during the era of the so-called “Great Divergence” around 1800. Divergent economic paths followed by China and Europe have long been the focus of debate. The project’s approach stems from interest in European and Chinese family and gender systems. Certain aspects of these systems – generational relations, life-cyclical transitions to adulthood, and marriage systems – have ramifications for household labour and familial responses to changing historical conditions. For the period of time when they are affiliated with the center, Mary Jo Maynes and Ann Waltner plan to focus on young women’s household and non-household labour (especially as producers of cotton and silk thread and cloth) as they move (or in some cases, do not move) through the life-cycle transition from daughter to wife and from a natal to a marital household. The project will also investigate the use/consumption of these textile goods as acquired by young women through market and non-market mechanisms locally, regionally and globally. The analysis will address existing bodies of historical data on household structure, wages, and prices, but its emphasis will be on new sources that the investigators and research assistants will compile, translate and interpret to allow for a comparative examination of internal relations within households, and the activities and situations of young women within these households. These sources include legal case records; prescriptive and descriptive texts indicating divisions of labour within households; records of material possessions, especially clothing; and fiction.
Publications
with Ann Waltner. ‘Family History and World History. From Domestication to Biopolitics’. In The Cambridge World History. Introducing World History, to 10,000 BCE, edited by David Christian, 1:208–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
with Donna R. Gabaccia, eds. Gender History Across Epistemologies. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
with Ann Waltner. ‘Temporalities and Periodization in Deep History. Technology, Gender, and Benchmarks of “Human Development"’. Social Science History 36, no. 1 (2012): 59–83.
with Ann Waltner. The Family. A World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
‘Age as a Category of Historical Analysis. History, Agency, and Narratives of Childhood’. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2007): 114–24.
with Birgitte Søland, and Christina Benninghaus, eds. Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills. Placing Girls in European History, 1750-1960. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005.
‘Gender, Labor, and Globalization in Historical Perspective. European Spinsters in the International Textile Industry, 1750-1900’. Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 4 (2004): 47–66.
with Ann Waltner. ‘Women’s Life-Cycle Transitions in World-Historical Perspective. Comparing Marriage in China and Europe’. Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 4 (2001): 11–21.
Taking the Hard Road. Life Course in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Last updated: May 03, 2016
Dr. Mira Mohsini
is a social anthropologist with a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She conducted research with Muslim artisans who are skilled in a form of embroidery done with metallic wires called zardozi. The primary fieldwork site was in the old city of Delhi, India where these artisans have lived and worked for generations. Her doctoral dissertation examined the increasing marginalization and exclusion of urban Muslim artisans from the broader rhetoric of “authenticity” in projects of nation-building, as well as subject-making. She focused on the strategies that artisans use to constitute themselves as “authentic” (asli) subjects, which included the incorporation of Islam into conceptions of ideal work practices; the construction of the “Other” through language that distinguished authentic from inauthentic; productions of lineage through narratives situated in both linear and non-linear temporal frameworks; and relations with the state – the largest patron of crafts in India – through encounters with government sponsored exhibitions and award competitions. Mira’s broader research interests include the historical formation of communities of urban workers; the practice of Islam in South and Central Asia; theoretical debates on embodiment, agency and the constitution of subjectivities; and the acquisition and transmission of skills.
Her project at re:work will explore the cultivation of subjectivities among urban Muslim workers, which are deeply informed by the cultivation of work and religious practices. Evidence suggests that there has been a long association between the development of a working-class ethos and forms of Sufi pedagogy. This proposed research will ethnographically examine how these historic ties are manifest today in the life cycle of urban artisans in India. The implications of this research will warrant a re-evaluation of a) the relationship between conceptions of work and religious praxis; b) prevailing assumptions about urban Muslim working-classes as being predisposed to “religious fundamentalism” and “communalism”; and c) the complex constitution of subaltern Muslim subjectivities.
Publications
‘Crafting Muslim Artisans. Agency and Exclusion in India’s Urban Craft Communities’. In Critical Craft. Technology, Globalization, and Capitalism, edited by Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola, 239–58. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
‘Crafts, Artisans and the Nation-State in Delhi’. In A Companion to the Anthropology of India, edited by Isabelle Clark-Decés and Christophe Guilmoto, 186–201. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
‘Engagement and Disengagement from the Margins. Perceptions of the State by Urban Muslim Artisans in India’. Contemporary South Asia 19, no. 3 (2011): 281–96.
with Robert Lawrence McKenzie. ‘Rethinking Research Methods. Introduction to the Special Edition’. Anthropology Matters 12, no. 1 (2010): 1–5.
‘Becoming an “Asli Karigar”. The Production of Authenticity Among Old Delhi’s Muslim Artisans’. PhD dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2010.
Last updated: May 03, 2016
Professor Michelle Moyd
Indiana University Bloomington, USA
is assistant professor of history at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where she teaches African history. She received her doctorate from Cornell University in 2008. Her research thus far has focused on the social and cultural history of African soldiers (askari) in the colonial army of German East Africa: today’s Tanzania. Her first book project analyses the askari as soldiers in the conquest of German East Africa, but also as colonial state-makers, or men who helped build the German overseas empire from the ground up. Their work for the colonial state paved the way for them to become “big men” within colonial society. In the process, they tied increasing numbers of people to the colonial state. In future projects, she will continue working on questions relating to the social and cultural history of African soldiers during the colonial and independence eras, and in a comparative perspective.Her project at re:work, entitled “Reworking War and Society: Colonial Military Communities, Labor, and Generations in Africa, ca. 1890–1968”, is an offshoot of her previous research on African colonial soldiers. In particular, she will be conducting comparative research exploring the relationships between armies and labour regimes in German, British and French colonial contexts. In this project, she also hopes to gain insight into gendered and generational understandings of appropriate kinds of work within colonial military communities. Another intellectual goal of the project is to develop a clearer understanding of the meanings of “work” in soldiering communities.
Publications
Violent Intermediaries. African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014.
‘Bomani. African Soldiers as Colonial Intermediaries in German East Africa, 1890-1914’. In German Colonialism Revisited. African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences, edited by Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Alain Patrice Nganang, 101–13. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2014.
‘Making the Household, Making the State. Colonial Military Communities and Labor in German East Africa’. International Labor and Working-Class History 80, no. 1 (2011): 53–76.
‘“We Don”t Want to Die for Nothing’. Askari at War in German East Africa, 1914-1918’. In Race, Empire and First World War Writing, edited by Santanu Das, 90–107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
‘“All People Were Barbarians To The Askari ...” Askari Identity And Honor In The Maji Maji War, 1905–1907’. In Maji Maji. Lifting the Fog of War, edited by James Leonard Giblin and Jamie Monson, 149–80. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
‘Askari and Askari Myth’. In A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures. Continental Europe and Its Empires, edited by Prem Poddar, Rajeev S. Patke, and Lars Jensen, 208–9. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
‘Becoming Askari. African Soldiers and Everyday Colonialims in German East Africa, 1850-1918’. PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2008.
Last updated: May 03, 2016
Professor Qin Shao
College of New Jersey, Ewing Township, USA
is professor of history at The College of New Jersey and a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California. She has published on ancient Chinese statecraft, China’s early urbanization effort, and the post-Mao reform in international journals; and is the author of Culturing Modernity: the Nantong Model, 1890–1930 (Stanford University Press, 2004) and Shanghai Gone: Demolition and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). Qin Shao’s research has been awarded various fellowships, including those from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the US Department of Education, and the National Association of Japan?America Societies. She has presented her work at the Harvard Law School, Columbia University, Stockholm University, The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Shanghai University, among other institutes.
At re:work, Qin Shao will study “Social Displacement and Change of Work and Life Course in Post-Mao China”. Based on years of field research and with an interdisciplinary approach and global perspective, this project explores an emerging issue: how have the vast geographic and other displacements – due to neck-breaking economic reforms generally and housing reform in particular – affected the work and life course of the Chinese people? It examines urban residents of a particular birth cohort from the mid-1940s to the 1950s whose loss of home coincide with the loss of employment because of the decline of state-owned enterprises and the state mandate on retirement age. The study sheds light on the interaction of social change and individual agency.
Publications
‘American Academic Freedom and Chinese Nationalism. An H-Asia Debate’. Positions. Asia Critique 23, no. 1 (2015): 41–48.
Shanghai Gone. Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.
‘Building Trust and Boundaries. Fieldwork in Shanghai’. Field Research Method Lab. The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2013.
‘Citizens versus Experts. Historic Preservation in Globalizing Shanghai’. Future Anterior. Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism 9, no. 1 (2012): 16–31.
‘Waving the Red Flag. Cultural Memory and Grassroots Protest in Housing Disputes in Shanghai’. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 22, no. 1 (2010): 197–231.
‘Bridge Under Water. The Dilemma of the Chinese Petition System’. China Currents 7, no. 1 (2008).
‘A Community of the Dispersed. The Culture of Shanghai’s Neighborhood Stock Markets’. The Chinese Historical Review 14, no. 2 (2007): 212–39.
Culturing Modernity. The Nantong Model, 1890-1930. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Last updated: May 04, 2016
Dr. Pradeep Shinde
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
pradeepshinde(at)mail.jnu.ac.in
is interested in such categories as work, mobility and labour. Along with these categories, he has also explored caste, kinship, gender and the state in his ethnographic research, which he carried out in the Mumbai slum of Dharavi between 2004 and 2006. Pradeep was a Ford Foundation International Fellow between 2002 and 2005. He received his PhD in social anthropology from the London School of Economics in January 2011. His doctoral thesis explores the everyday struggle of a denotified tribe, the Kunchikorves, one of the erstwhile nomadic tribes that were categorized by the British as ‘criminal tribes’ under the ‘Criminal Tribes Acts’ of 1871, which was repealed in 1952. His thesis also explores the tribe’s mobility through various forms of work in the realms of the formal and the informal sectors by using their kinship networks. Soon after obtaining his PhD, Pradeep received a DAAD teaching fellowship under the A New Passage to India programme to teach at the International Centre for Development and Decent work at the University of Kassel for three months (April 11, 2011 to July 11, 2011).
Currently, Pradeep studies the sanitary contract workers who work in Mumbai city slums on contracts that are funded by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and carried out by a plethora of private contractors hired by the corporation. The argument Pradeep makes in this context of privatization is that although the BMC is implementing its privatization agenda through sanitary services, the agenda is not devoid of any work, as the converse is largely argued. The BMC also creates work in city slums. What is happening here is that work is not disappearing, but being withheld by private contractors who deprive contract workers of a just living. As Pradeep argues, this clearly shows that the role of the local state (BMC) is ambiguous, as the BMC creates jobs, but at the same time it fails to rein in private interests.
Publications
‘Aiming High. Higher Education Among the Kunchikorves of Dharavi’. In Accessing Higher Education. Footprints of Marginalised Groups, edited by Govardhan Wankhede and Ivan Reid, 110–50. Delhi: Aakar, 2017.
‘Our Crippled Identity. United We Need to Stand’. In Dalit, Assertion for Identity. Proceedings of the National Seminar of Dalit Postgraduate and Research Students Held on 23-25 January 1999, in the Indian Social Institute, edited by Ambrose Pinto, 140–52. New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1999.
Last updated: April 18, 2018
Professor Jelmer Vos
University of Glasgow, UK
is assistant professor of history at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, where much of his teaching focuses on Africa’s historical relations to the wider world. His research deals primarily with the Kongo region of northern Angola, and beginning with the 1860s, questions how trade transitioned in the Kongo from the export of slaves to the production of colonial goods.
At re:work, Jelmer will examine the experience of the Kongo people under early colonial rule. Redefining the kingdom of Kongo as a moral community, the project looks at the appropriation by old and new Kongo elites of the colonial world of trade houses, mission schools and nascent bureaucracies, and how this world ultimately imploded under the pressure of colonial tax and labour demands.
Publications
‘The Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the Windward Coast of Africa’. In The Rise and Demise of Atlantic Slavery and the Slave Trade, edited by Philip Misevich and Kristin Mann. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, forthcoming.
Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860-1913. The Breakdown of a Moral Order. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.
‘Work in Times of Slavery, Colonialism, and Civil War. Labor Relations in Angola from 1800 to 2000’. History in Africa 41 (2014): 363–85.
‘Of Stocks and Barter. John Holt and the Kongo Rubber Trade, 1906-1910’. In Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions, edited by Jonathan Curry-Machado, 77–99. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.
‘From Colonial Revolt to Pre-Colonial History. Reflections on the Kongo Uprising of 1913’. In Das autonomias à autonomia e à independência. O Atlântico político entre os séculos XV e XXI, edited by Avelino de Freitas de Meneses, 137–52. Ponta Delgada: Letras Lavadas, 2012.
‘“Without the Slave Trade, No Recruitment.” From Slave Trading to “Migrant Recruitment” in the Lower Congo, 1830-90’. In Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake. Law and the Experience of Women and Children, edited by Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, 45–64. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012.
‘Child Slaves and Freemen at the Spiritan Mission in Soyo, 1880-1885’. Journal of Family History 35, no. 1 (2010): 71–90.
with David Eltis, and David Richardson. ‘The Dutch in the Atlantic World. New Perspectives from the Slave Trade with Particular Reference to the African Origins of the Traffic’. In Extending the Frontiers. Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by David Eltis and David Richardson, 228–49. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
Last updated: May 04, 2016
Professor Ann Waltner
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
teaches history at the University of Minnesota, specializing in the social history of late imperial China, with a particular interest in kinship, gender and religion as well as in comparative and world history. Since 2005, she has been the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, a university-wide interdisciplinary research centre. From 2000 to 2005 she edited the Journal of Asian Studies.
While at re:work, she will collaborate with Mary Jo Maynes on a project focusing on young women’s transition to adulthood in China and Western Europe during the era of the so-called “Great Divergence” around 1800. The project will focus on young women’s household and non-household labour (especially as producers of cotton and silk thread and cloth) as they move (or in some cases, do not move) through the life-cycle transition from daughter to wife and from a natal to a marital household. It will also examine the consumption of these textile goods as acquired by young women through market and non-market mechanisms locally, regionally and globally. The project will draw upon existing bodies of historical data on household structure, wages and prices, but will also emphasize new sources that will illuminate internal relations within households, and the activities and situations of young women within these households. Sources will include legal case records; prescriptive and descriptive texts indicating divisions of labour within households; records of material possessions, especially clothing; and fiction.
Publications
with Mary Jo Maynes. ‘Family History and World History. From Domestication to Biopolitics’. In The Cambridge World History. Introducing World History, to 10,000 BCE, edited by David Christian, 1:208–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
with Mary Jo Maynes. The Family. A World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
with Mary Jo Maynes. ‘Temporalities and Periodization in Deep History. Technology, Gender, and Benchmarks of “Human Development"’. Social Science History 36, no. 1 (2012): 59–83.
‘Life and Letters. Reflections on Tanyangzi’. In Beyond Exemplar Tales. Women’s Biography in Chinese History, edited by Joan Judge and Ying Hu, 212–29. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011.
with Qin Fang, and Linda Pearse. ‘Performing Matteo Ricci. The Map and the Music’. Ming Studies 2010, no. 62 (2010): 1–24.
‘Remembering the Lady Wei. Eulogy and Commemoration in Ming Dynasty China’. Ming Studies 55, no. 1 (2007): 75–103.
with Mary Jo Maynes. ‘Women’s Life-Cycle Transitions in World-Historical Perspective. Comparing Marriage in China and Europe’. Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 4 (2001): 11–21.
Getting an Heir. Adoption and the Construction of Kinship in Late Imperial China. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.
Last updated: May 09, 2016
Professor Michael Wildt
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
michael.wildt(at)geschichte.hu-berlin.de
began an apprenticeship as a bookseller, before taking up a position in the Rowohlt publishing house. He then studied history, sociology and theology at the University of Hamburg. Between 1992 and 1997 he was a research assistant in Hamburg at the research centre for the history of National Socialism. Between 1997 and 2009 he was a research assistant at the Institute for Social Research, also in Hamburg. Since 2009 he has been professor of 20th century German history at Humboldt University, Berlin with a focus on National Socialism.He is a member of the editorial board of Yad Vashem Studies; co-editor of the journals Historische Anthropologie and WerkstattGeschichte, and a member of the scientific advisory board at the Institute for Contemporary History, Munich.During his Fellowship at re:work he will investigate work during National Socialism. Work was a central concept under National Socialism and described very different social, political and cultural practices. Work served as a central practice in defining the inclusion of Volksgenossinnen and Volksgenossen, and as such, the “national community”. Before the war, work was a decisive means of “educating” people held in concentration camps and was used to convert political (non-Jewish) opponents into Volksgenossen. At the same time, work in the concentration camps was an instrument of humiliation and violence. Forced labour by foreign workers and concentration camp prisoners became an essential resource for the continued production of armaments during the war.Moreover, by classifying people as able or unable to work, work served as a decisive criterion for selection, and often decided on the life or death of Jews, Roma, Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, concentration camp prisoners and forced labourers. This project aims to examine these diverse dimensions of work under National Socialism.
Publications
with Christoph Kreutzmüller, and Moshe Zimmermann, eds. National Economies. Volks-Wirtschaft, Racism and Economy in Europe Between the Wars (1918 - 1939/45). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.
with Marc Buggeln, eds. Arbeit im Nationalsozialismus. München: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014.
‘Der Begriff der Arbeit bei Hitler’. In Arbeit im Nationalsozialismus, edited by Michael Wildt and Marc Buggeln, 3–24. München: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014.
Geschichte Denken. Perspektiven auf die Geschichtsschreibung heute, ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014.
Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion. Violence Against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919-1939. Translated by Bernard Heise. New York, NY: Berghahn, 2012.
with Alf Lüdtke, eds. Staats-Gewalt. Ausnahmezustand und Sicherheitsregimes. Historische Perspektiven. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008.
with Ulrike Jureit, eds. Generationen. Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005.
Vom kleinen Wohlstand. Eine Konsumgeschichte der fünfziger Jahre. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996.
Last updated: May 12, 2016
Professor Aloys Winterling
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
aloys.winterling(at)geschichte.hu-berlin.de
is professor of ancient history at Humboldt University, Berlin. Previously he was professor of ancient history at the Universities of Bielefeld and Basel, and professor of ancient history and historical anthropology at the University of Freiburg. Between 2006 and 2007 he was a fellow at the Historical Research Centre in Munich. His research interests include comparative studies of the court and monarchy in early modern Europe and Greek and Roman antiquity; methodological problems of historical biographies and historical anthropology, and the political integration and the interpretation of self by ancient societies.At re:work Aloys Winterling is currently working on aristocratic work in late republican Rome. In this period, and presumably in all aristocratic societies, labour was associated with low social status and viewed as incompatible with the lifestyle of the aristocracy. However, ancient Roman aristocracy was also characterized by a remarkable orientation towards political achievement and careers: a successful career was full of different kinds of, in part, time-consuming and laborious political activities, including the maintenance of friendships and clientelistic relationships, electoral campaigns, political office, membership of the senate, warfare and provincial administration; activities, which in today’s terminology can only be described as ‘labour’. Aloys Winterling uses the example of Cicero’s writings to show how aristocratic political work was conceptualized, reflected and differentiated from other kinds of work as negotium and how it was idealized as an ambition in aristocratic life.
Publications
‘Wie modern war die Antike? Was soll die Frage?’ In Geschichte Denken. Perspektiven Auf Die Geschichtsschreibung Heute, edited by Michael Wildt, 12–33. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014.
with Natascha Sojc, and Ulrike Wulf-Rheidt, eds. Palast und Stadt im severischen Rom. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2013.
‘Probleme historischer Biographie am Beispiel des Kaisers Caligula’. Historische Anthropologie 20, no. 2 (2012): 186–99.
Caligula. A Biography. Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider, Glenn W Most, and Paul Psoinos. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011.
Zwischen Strukturgeschichte und Biographie. Probleme und Perspektiven einer neuen römischen Kaisergeschichte zur Zeit von Augustus bis Commodus, ed. München: Oldenbourg, 2011.
Politics and Society in Imperial Rome. Translated by Kathrin Lüddecke. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Historische Anthropologie, ed. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2006.
Aula Caesaris. Studien zur Institutionalisierung des römischen Kaiserhofes in der Zeit von Augustus bis Commodus (31 v. Chr.-192 n. Chr.). München: Oldenbourg, 1999.
Last updated: May 12, 2016