Fellows 2014/2015
Professor Hans Bertram
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Work-Life Balance. Comparing Japan and Germany
From the very start of his academic career Hans Bertram has studied the socio-structural conditions for the development of children in the family and in modern society combining an empirical and a theoretical approach. In 1980, besides receiving a Heisenberg fellowship, he became professor of sociology at the Bundeswehr University Munich. From 1984 to 1992, he was a member of the board of directors of the German Youth Institute DJI (Deutsches Jugendinstitut) in Munich, acting as its academic director. Based on microcensus and oral interview data he developed the DJI’s family survey as a basis for empirical social reporting for the German government. Between 1992 and 2014, he held the chair for microsociology at Berlin’s Humboldt University.
As an academic member of the expert committee that prepared the German government’s 8th youth report “Aufgaben und Leistungen der Jugendhilfe”, he provided the academic fundaments for a reform of child and youth protection legislation (1990/91, German code of social law SGB VIII). Under his guidance, an expert committee drafted the German government’s 7th family report “Families between flexibility and dependability – Perspectives for a life cycle-related family policy” (2006). The report accounts for the three vectors of money, time and infrastructure, and subsequently influenced, for example, the new law on parent allowances.
Between 1992 and 1997, he headed the Commission for Research on Social and Political Change in the New Federal States, KSPW e.V. (Kommission zur Erforschung des sozialen und politischen Wandels in den Neuen Bundesländern). In addition, Hans Bertram was a member of the commission for the future “Gesellschaft 2000” in Baden Württemberg, the Robert Bosch Foundation’s commission “Familie und demographischer Wandel”, head of the advisory council for family policy of the government of the German state of Brandenburg, member of the fact-finding commission in the parliament of Saxony, “Demographische Entwicklung und ihre Auswirkungen auf die Lebensbereiche der Menschen im Freistaat Sachsen sowie ihrer Folgen für die politischen Handlungsfelder”, member of the German President’s working group on demographic change, “Demographischer Wandel”, and member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
His current research project at re:work “Wandel und Entwicklung von Familie in Deutschland und Japan” builds on numerous research projects on the situation of children and families in Germany, as well as on changes and developments in the areas of family, ties and care in Germany and in global comparison. His project takes into account the changes to the economic conditions for families, applies a life-cycle perspective to changes in how young adults transition into employment and integrates social reporting based on microcensus while stressing the importance of small social networks in the context of solidarity and subsidiarity in modern society.
Publications
with Carolin Deuflhard. Die überforderte Generation. Arbeit und Familie in der Wissensgesellschaft. Leverkusen: Budrich, 2015.
‘Fertilität, Zukunft mit Kindern und die Bedeutung des regionalen Kontextes’. In Doing Family. Warum Familienleben heute nicht mehr selbstverständlich ist, edited by Karin Jurczyk, Andreas Lange, and Barbara Thiessen, 160–89. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa, 2014.
Reiche, kluge, glückliche Kinder? Der UNICEF-Bericht zur Lage der Kinder in Deutschland, ed. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa, 2013.
with Martin Bujard, eds. Zeit, Geld, Infrastruktur. Zur Zukunft der Familienpolitik. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012.
with Nancy Ehlert, eds. Family, Ties and Care. Family Transformation in a Plural Modernity. The Freiberger Survey about Family Transformation in an International Comparsion. Opladen: Budrich, 2012.
with C. Katharina Spieß, eds. Fragt die Eltern! Ravensburger Elternsurvey Elterliches - Wohlbefinden in Deutschland. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2011.
with Birgit Bertram. Familie, Sozialisation und die Zukunft der Kinder. Opladen: Budrich, 2009.
‘Moral Obligations and Values in an Individualized Society’. In Adversity and Challenge in Life in the New Germany and in England, edited by John Bynner and Rainer K. Silbereisen, 193–211. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Last updated: March 04, 2016
Dr. Charlotte Bruckermann
London School of Economics, United Kingdom
Homemaking in Rural China. Women's Everyday and Ritual Work in Generating Notions of Place
Charlotte received her doctorate in Anthropology at the University of Oxford in 2013. Between 2012 and 2014 she worked as a research and teaching Fellow in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her areas of expertise include the anthropology of China, ritual, work, home, gender, kinship, economic transformation, and post-socialism. Charlotte’s on-going research explores how people make themselves at home under conditions of political and economic transformation in rural China. Her doctoral thesis argues that people create attachments to the home through work done on one another’s behalf. Her theoretical interest lies in connecting wider social processes to personal life projects through the intimate sphere of the home.
Charlotte’s research project at re:work focuses on women’s productive, reproductive and ritual work in creating rural Chinese homes. In this context women attribute value and negotiate belonging to houses, fields, food, and persons across generational divides and changing livelihood strategies. Through intergenerational comparisons between people who came of age under Maoism and the Market Era, this research explores the legacy of state socialism and the reach of contemporary capitalism in evaluating women’s work. More broadly, this research investigates the material, emotional, and ritual efficacy of labour in constituting place.
Publications
‘Trading on Tradition. Tourism, Ritual, and Capitalism in a Chinese Village’. Modern China 42, no. 2 (2016): 188–224.
‘Life in the Rural Shanxi House. Seasonal Resonances and Techniques of Transformation in North-Central China’. PhD dissertation, University of Oxford, 2013.
Last updated: March 04, 2016
Professor Christoph Conrad
Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland
Unpacking 'Global Aging'. Work-Retirement Arrangements between Demographic Scenarios and Welfare Regimes
Since 2002, Christoph Conrad is professor for modern history at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Previously, he worked for the Friedrich Meinecke Institute at the FU Berlin, where he received his PhD in 1992. His main research interests lie in the history of the welfare state and consumer society, the theory and history of historiography, as well as comparative and transnational history. He has been awarded fellowships and guest professorship positions at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS), the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Vienna and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (Frias), among others.
His current research project Unpacking ‘Global Aging’ is related to his earlier work on the history of age and ageing, but adds a global and highly contemporary perspective. Over the past 20 to 25 years, the discourse on global population development has undergone fundamental changes. In a radical shift of perspective the fear of an ‘exploding population’ or ‘overpopulation’ has been replaced by concerns over widespread ageing and the “greying” of the planet. “Global Ageing”, as a concept, is an assembly of academic, political and economic strategies that has developed into an object for practices of knowledge and governance. Undoubtedly, international organisations such as the United Nations have been behind this process, as have been academic research institutes and the think tanks of the insurance and finance industries.
In a first phase, the research project will reconstruct the demographic determinants and politics of knowledge that inform this fundamental shift of perspective. Of particular interest will be the expansion and the orientation effects of the new planning horizon. In its second phase, the project will focus on a field particularly sensitive for the shaping of work and life-cycles within the context of global ageing. These are the options available in the final stages of life, in particular during the transition from working life to retirement. This will require a re-assessment of historic case studies, but shall also include scrutinising current examples from different parts of the world. One key question will be the extent to which historically informed predictions of and recommendations for future life-cycle regimes are possible within the global context.
Publications
‘Mikro- und Makro-Pfadabhängigkeiten. Ein vergleichender Kommentar’. In Arbeit und Recht seit 1800. Historisch und vergleichend, europäisch und global, edited by Joachim Rückert, 219–25. Köln: Böhlau, 2014.
‘Was macht eigentlich der Wohlfahrtsstaat? Internationale Perspektiven auf das 20. und 21. Jahrhundert’. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 39, no. 4 (2013): 555–92.
‘Social Policy History After the Transnational Turn’. In Beyond Welfare State Models. Transnational Historical Perspectives on Social Policy, edited by Pauli Kettunen and Klaus Petersen, 218–40. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011.
with Sebastian Conrad, eds. Die Nation schreiben. Geschichtswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002.
with Michael Lechner, and Welf Werner. ‘East German Fertility After Unification. Crisis or Adaptation?’ Population and Development Review 22, no. 2 (1996): 331–58.
Vom Greis zum Rentner. Der Strukturwandel des Alters in Deutschland zwischen 1830 und 1930. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994.
‘The Emergence of Modern Retirement. Germany in an International Comparison (1850-1960)’. Population. An English Selection 3 (1991): 171–200.
with Paul Johnson, and David Thomson, eds. Workers Versus Pensioners. Intergenerational Justice in an Ageing World. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989.
Last updated: March 04, 2016
Dr. des. Michelle Engeler
Universität Basel, Switzerland
Life Plans of West African Academics
Michelle Engeler is a postdoc at the Centre for African Studies in Basel, Switzerland, where she is a member of the research project ‘Construire son Avenir. Self-Conceptions and Career Practices of Young Graduates in Burkina Faso and Mali’ and coordinator of the scientific communication project ‘Longing for the Future. Practices and Imaginations of Young Graduates’.
Michelle studied Social Anthropology, History and Geography at the University of Basel, Switzerland (lic. phil; 2006). After her studies she was assistant at the Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Switzerland (Political Geography; 2007-2009) and at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Basel, Switzerland (Social Anthropology; 2011-2014). Her PhD thesis (completed in 2013) focused on youth-state relations in a small border town in Guinea. Key questions addressed young people’s agency, different actors life trajectories and the state in the making.
Her research project at re:work examines (mobile) life plans and social imaginations of West African academics. The life histories of men and women who studied in the 1960ies, 1970ies or 1980ies at the University of Ouagadougou (UO) in Burkina Faso represent the point of departure. Based on these biographic narratives the project intends to grasp career trajectories, identities and social utopias of UO alumni to relate them to past and present political transformations, societal ideas and patterns of mobility.
Publications
‘At the Crossroads. Youth and State Re-Making in Guéckédou, Guinea’. PhD dissertation, Universität Basel, 2013.
with Carole Ammann. ‘“Guinée is back?” Ein Land zwischen Wandel und Kontinuität.’ Afrika-Bulletin 152 (2013): 3.
‘Listening, Experiencing, Observing. Reflections on Doing Fieldwork’. Basel Papers on Political Transformations, no. 3 (2011): 20–24.
with Benedikt Korf, and Tobias Hagmann. ‘The Geography of Warscape’. Third World Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2010): 385–99.
‘Bilder von Staat’. Tsantsa, no. 14 (2009): 158–71.
‘Guinea in 2008. The Unfinished Revolution’. Politique Africaine, no. 112 (2008): 87–98.
with Korf, Benedikt. ‘Geographien der Gewalt’. Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie 51, no. 3–4 (2007): 221–37.
Last updated: March 07, 2016
Professor Norbert Finzsch
Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany
The End of Slavery, the Role of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Introduction of Sharecropping in the American South, 1863 to 1880
norbert.finzsch(at)uni-koeln.de
Norbert Finzsch studied History, German Literature, Sociology and Art History at the Universities of Cologne (Germany) and Bordeaux III (France). He graduated in 1977 and continued as a doctoral student at Cologne and Berkeley (California). In 1980 he finished his dissertation on the history of labor conditions in the California mining business, 1848-1860. In 1988 he passed the Habilitation with a book on the history of the lower classes in the Rhineland in the 18th and early 19th centuries. After serving a as temporary professor at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Finzsch was appointed Deputy Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington DC in 1990. In 1992 he was employed as Professor of History at the University of Hamburg (1992-2000), served a short time as Professor of English and History at the University of Bordeaux III (2001), before being appointed Professor of North American History at the University of Cologne (2001-present).
Finzsch has received numerous grants and fellowships at universities and research institutions in Berkeley, Paris, Canberra (Australia), Bordeaux, Cape Town. He was the recipient of both a DAAD grant, an ACLS fellowship and a Fulbright fellowship. The University of California at Berkeley invited him as a visiting scholar in 1996, 1997 and 1999/2000. In 2012/13 he served as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for European Studies in Berkeley.
Finzsch’s research interests range from cliometrics to discourse theory, from the history of African Americans to the history of Genocides. Recently he has done research on the history of Social Ecological Systems and how they affect the lives of indigenous groups in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
His research project at re: work deals with the development of new forms of quasi-capitalist labor in the American South after the end of the American Civil War. Despite governmental attempts to install a system of wage labor in the South, the resulting system of sharecropping represented a hybrid mixture of elements of chattel slavery and wage labor. Finzsch is attempting to show that this outcome was both the consequence of failed actions by the government which did provide freedpeople with available land, the inadequate policies of the Freedmen’s Bureau as the main agency in charge of Reconstruction and the attempts of the previous slaveholders to reinstall a system that would give them access to cheap agricultural labor. Add to this the weakness of the Republican administration in the former slave states and the constant and systematic violence applied against Republicans, northern businessmen and politically active freedmen and one can understand why “free labor” never stood a chance south of the Mason-Dixon-Line.
Finzsch has published widely in American and German history, in comparative history and in the history of gender and sexuality.
Publications
‘“The Intrusion Therefore of Cattle Is by Itself Sufficient to Produce the Extirpation of the Native Race”. Social Ecological Systems and Ecocide in Conflicts Between Hunter–Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers in Australia’. Settler Colonial Studies [= Special Issue Experiences, Actors, Spaces. Dimensions of Settler Colonialism in Transnational Perspective], 1 December 2015, 28 pp.
‘The Harlem Renaissance, 1919-1935. American Modernism, Multiple Modernities or Postcolonial Diaspora’. In Fractured Modernity. America Confronts Modern Times, 1890s to 1940s, edited by Thomas Welskopp and Alan Lessoff, 193–212. München: Oldenbourg, 2012.
‘Krise und »Rasse«. Wie Hypersegregation strukturellen Rassismus erzeugt’. In American Dream? Eine Weltmacht in der Krise, edited by Andreas Etgers and Winfried Fluck, 177–94. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2011.
‘The End of Slavery, the Role of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Introduction of Peonage’. In The End of Slavery in Africia and the Americas. A Comparative Approach, edited by Ulrike Schmieder, Katja Füllberg-Stolberg, and Michael Zeuske, 141–63. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011.
with Michael Zeuske. ‘What Came after Emancipation? A Micro-Historical Comparison between Cuba and the United States’. In Humanitarian Intervention and Changing Labor Relations. The Long-Term Consequences of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, edited by Marcel van der Linden, 285–318. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
‘“[…] Extirpate or Remove That Vermine”. Genocide, Biological Warfare, and Settler Imperialism in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century’. Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 2 (2008): 215–32.
Last updated: March 07, 2016
Dr. Isabella Löhr
Universität Osnabrück, DE
Research on the Run, or, the Global Networks of Academic Placement Policies, 1920s to 1950s
isabella.loehr@uni-osnabrueck.de
Isabella Löhr is a research assistant at the Institute for European Global Studies at the University of Basel. Löhr studied cultural studies and philosophy at Leipzig University, the university from which she also received her PhD in comparative social and cultural history in 2008. Her dissertation on the globalisation of intellectual property rights and the global expansion of such rights since the late 19th century explored how tightly these rights were connected to the social, cultural and economic processes of globalisation as well as the foundation of international organisations. Between 2008 and 2013, she worked for the History Department of Heidelberg University. Her main research interests are the relation between the state, governance and processes of globalisation, the social history of international networks, global biographies and historic migration and refugee research.
Isabella Löhr’s research at re:work will focus on global academic employment networks during the first half of the 20th century. The main concentration of her project will be those organisations that, starting in the 1930s, helped persecuted academics escape and find new positions at foreign universities. These organisations needed to balance their rescue work and their humanitarian aid with the presentation of themselves as strictly academic organisations. At closer look however, it becomes evident that in the daily practice of these organisations, the assessment of individual careers, academic achievements and scientific evaluation were more important than humanitarian impulses. These academic rescue organisations represented themselves as global employment centres that developed and organised a supra-national market for academic positions and serviced this market with corresponding dossiers.
By focussing on rescue organisations, the project examines the development of a market for academic positions with a potentially global reach. The project studies the structures and practices that were the foundation for the international placement of researchers as well as the impact of coercion and persecution on the perception and valuation of academic career patterns in the crucial phase for Western societies between 1920 and 1950. The focus will be on how these organisations developed markets for academic positions and subsequently greatly internationalised these markets by mobilising cross-border solidarity, by combining academic and scientific research with refugee policies, as well as by introducing standardised evaluation criteria for “good science”.
Publications
with Andrea Rehling, eds. Global Commons im 20. Jahrhundert. Entwürfe für eine globale Welt [= Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte/European History Yearbook, 15]. München: Oldenbourg, 2014.
‘Solidarity and the Academic Community. The Support Networks for Refugee Scholars in the 1930s’. In Histories of Transnational Humanitarianism. Between Solidarity and Self-Interest [= Journal of Modern European History, 12 (2)], edited by Daniel Laqua and Charlotte Alston, 231–46. München: C.H. Beck, 2014.
‘Le droit d’auteur et la Première Guerre mondiale. Un exemple de coopération transnationale européenne’. Le mouvement social 244, no. 1 (2013): 67–80.
‘Transnational Cooperation in Wartime. The International Protection of Intellectual Property Rights During World War I’. In The Foundations of Worldwide Economic Integration. Powers, Institutions, and Global Markets, 1850–1930, edited by Niels P. Petersson and Christoph Dejung, 205–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
with Madeleine Herren, eds. Lives Beyond Borders. A Social History, 1880–1950 [= Comparativ, 23 (6)]. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2013.
with Roland Wenzlhuemer, eds. The Nation State and Beyond. Governing Globalization Processes in the 19th and Early 20th Century. Berlin: Springer, 2013.
Die Globalisierung geistiger Eigentumsrechte. Neue Strukturen internationaler Zusammenarbeit 1886–1952. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010.
Last updated: February 12, 2016
Professor Anupama Rao
Columbia University, New York, USA
Dalit Bombay. Stigma, Precarity, and the Everyday Life of Outcaste Labor
Anupama Rao has research and teaching interests in the history of anti-colonialism; gender and sexuality studies; caste and race; historical anthropology, social theory, andcolonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism. Her book, The Caste Question (University of California Press, 2009) theorized caste subalternity, with specific focus on the role of anti-caste thought (and its thinkers) in producing alternative genealogies of political subject-formation through the vernacularization of political universals. She has also written extensively on the themes of colonialism and humanitarianism, and on non-Western histories of gender and sexuality.
She is co-convenor of a project on “Subaltern Urbanism,” supported by the Heyman Center for the Humanities, and by the project on “Women Creating Change,” hosted by Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference; co-convenor of a project supported by the Mellon Foundation and the International Institute of Asian Studies (Leiden), on “Asian Spatialities”; and Senior Editor, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East
Rao received her BA, with honors, from the University of Chicago, and her Ph.D. from the interdepartmental program in anthropology and history at the University of Michigan. She has served as president of the Society for the Advancement of the History of South Asia (SAHSA) of the American Historical Association (2010); director of the project on “Liberalism and its Others,” at the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University; and as a member of the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, 2010-12. Her work has been supported by grants from the ACLS; the American Institute for Indian Studies; the Mellon Foundation; the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the SSRC. She was a Fellow-in-Residence at the National Humanities Center from 2008-09, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford during 2010-11.
At REWORK, Rao will be working on a project titled Dalit Bombay, which explores the relationship between caste, political culture, and everyday life in colonial and postcolonial Bombay.
Publications
More, Satyendra. Memoirs of a Dalit Communist. The Many Worlds of R.B. More (Edited and Introduced by Anupama Rao). Edited by Anupama Rao. Translated by Wandana Sonalkar. Delhi: LeftWord, 2019.
with Saurabh Dube, eds. Crime Through Time. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013.
‘Violence and Humanity. Or, Vulnerability as Political Subjectivity’. Social Research. An International Quarterly 78, no. 2 (2011): 607–32.
‘India and Global History’. History and Technology 26, no. 1 (2010): 77–84.
The Caste Question. Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009.
with Steven Pierce, eds. Discipline and the Other Body. Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
with Shani D’Cruze, eds. Violence, Vulnerability and Embodiment [= Special Issue Gender & History, 16 (3)]. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Gender & Caste, ed. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003.
Last updated: June 4, 2020
Professor Stephen Rockel
University of Toronto, Canada
Community and Identity in the East African Slave Trade. From the Great Lakes to the Indian Ocean Coast
Stephen J. Rockel has taught African History at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, and the University of Toronto, Canada. He has particular interests in labour history, slavery and urbanization, as well as the social and political history of imperialism, war and conflict. Although he is a specialist in East African history and, to some extent, South Africa, he has developing interests in the Indian Ocean region. Recent and ongoing research projects include histories of Tabora – a nineteenth century East African commercial city, a study of the autobiography of Adrian Atiman – a freed slave and the first African medical doctor in Tanzania, and agro-pastoralism in western Tanzania.
At re:work he will study the history of slavery along the central caravan route in modern Tanzania, the major East African trade route of the nineteenth century. The project has three aims. The first is to research the extent to which the route between Lake Tanganyika and ports on the Indian Ocean coast near Zanzibar (the Mrima coast) was important for the East African and Indian Ocean slave trade. This is controversial. Key histories show that the route with its caravan stops and market towns facilitated commerce in exported ivory and imported textiles and other industrial goods. The trade routes developed as East Africans participated in the global capitalist system, shaping it through their consumption preferences. Thus slavery followed commerce. In some works, however, the central route is referred to as the “slave route.” Yet all the evidence points to just a trickle of captives reaching the coast through central Tanzania despite the annual movement of tens of thousands of people.
The second aim is to examine slavery and the emergence of new urban communities. Large numbers of slaves of various origins populated the towns of the central routes, and were incorporated into commercialized chiefdoms. Their work underwrote the trading and urban infrastructure into the colonial period and the reproduction of slave communities contributed to a common multiethnic culture. Even if the central route was perhaps not a “slave route”, it appears that a number of “islands” of slavery emerged along it over a century of the slave trade, migration and settlement.
The final aim is to trace the genealogy of the idea of the central route as a “slave route.” This notion is embedded in colonial and mission sources influencing later writers. Such perspectives often narrowly define the history of East African slavery as Arab and Swahili cruelty ignoring widespread participation of Europeans, Arabs, Indians and Africans.
Publications
‘The Tutsi and the Nyamwezi. The Transformation of Agro-Pastoralism in Nineteenth-Century Western Tanzania’. In Bridging Histories of East and Central Africa, edited by Achim von Oppen, Katharina Zöller, and Geert Castryck, forthcoming.
‘Between Pori, Pwani and Kisiwani. Overlapping Labour Cultures in the Caravans, Ports and Dhows of the Western Indian Ocean’. In The Indian Ocean. Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies, edited by Abdul Sheriff and Engseng Ho, 95–122. London: Hurst, 2014.
‘Decentering Exploration in East Africa’. In Reinterpreting Exploration. The West in the World, edited by Dane Keith Kennedy, 172–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
‘New Labor History in Sub-Saharan Africa. Colonial Enslavement and Forced Labor’. International Labor and Working-Class History 86 (2014): 159–72.
‘Slavery and Freedom in Nineteenth Century East Africa. The Case of Waungwana Caravan Porters’. African Studies 68, no. 1 (2009): 87–109.
Carriers of Culture. Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century East Africa. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006.
‘Forgotten Caravan Towns in 19th Century Tanzania. Mbwamaji and Mpwapwa’. Azania. Archaeological Research in Africa 41, no. 1 (2006): 1–25.
Last updated: March 09, 2016
Professor Paul-André Rosental
Sciences Po, Paris, France
Growth, Precarious Employment, and Social Inequalities. A Comparative Eurasian Study
Paul-André Rosental has held the professorship of contemporary history at Sciences Po since 2009; he is currently the deputy director of research at its History Centre. He also co-founded and directs Esopp, a research group at the Center of Historical Studies that is dedicated to studying social, health and demographic policies from a historical perspective. Rosental is an associate researcher at the French National Institute for Demographic Study (INED).
Rosental has been provided with a senior advanced grant from the European Research Council to study diseases caused by mineral particles related to occupational and environmental hazards from a historical, sociological and medical perspective. He currently supervises the theses of a dozen doctoral candidates in various fields of research.
Paul-André Rosental received his diploma from HEC and began his career at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) as part of a large research project studying the long history of mobility and inequality. After completing his thesis under the guidance of Jacques Revel, he worked as a lecturer. Since 2003, Rosental has worked as a tutor for the EHESS; he also directs its Center of Historical Studies. His current research is focused on the history of migration, the family, public health and the reconfiguration of the concepts behind eugenics since 1945.
At re:work, Paul-André Rosental will focus on forms of precarity and uncertainty inherent to wage relations during the Trente Glorieuses – the thirty years of economic growth between 1945 and 1975 in France. With the downfall of the Fordist and Keynesian models of growth, as well as the effects of globalisation, many people believe that today’s most advanced economies are experiencing a reduction in the “security” that once stood at the heart of the social contract and social citizenship, and that this security will not return. According to this narrative, advanced economies are now experiencing the destabilisation of a model of social wellbeing that took decades to mature. Rosental’s current project will compare the social consequences of the post-World War II high-growth regimes in France and Japan with the consequences of the high levels of growth currently occurring in China. Developments in China, however, will not be analysed to develop a unique model of interpretation; instead, the focus will be placed on less visible aspects of the history of France’s Trente Glorieuses. Rosental will work together with Gilles Guiheux (Université de Paris-Diderot), who will analyse the Chinese case, and Bernard Thomann (Inalco), who will look at Japan.
Publications
Ed. Silicosis. A World History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.
with Thomas Cayet, eds. Internationalisation des politiques sociales et du droit au XXe siècle [= Dossier, Le Mouvement Social, 244 (3)]. Paris: La Découverte, 2013.
‘Eugenics and Social Security in France before and after the Vichy Regime’. Journal of Modern European History 10, no. 4 (2012): 540–62.
with Stéphane Buzzi, and Jean-Claude Devinck. La santé au travail, 1880-2006. Paris: La Découverte, 2010.
Health and Safety at Work. A Transnational History [= Journal of Modern European History, 7 (2)] , ed. München: C.H. Beck, 2009.
Histoire politique des populations [= Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 61 (1)] , ed. Pais: EHESS, 2006.
L’intelligence démographique. Sciences et politiques des populations en France, 1930-1960. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003.
Les sentiers invisibles. Espaces, familles et migrations dans la France du 19e siècle. Paris: EHESS, 1999.
Last updated: April 09, 2019
Dr. Sabine Rutar
Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung, Regensburg, Germany
Life and Labour in Cold War Borderland. Shipyard and Port Workers' Milieus in the Northeastern Adriatic, 1945-1990
Sabine Rutar completed her PhD in 2001 at the department of History and Civilization at the European University in Florence. Since, she has worked for the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig (2001-2002), at the Institute for Social Movements, Bochum (2003-2007), as well as at the Institute for East and Southeast European Studies Regensburg (since 2008). In 2007/08 she received a Feodor Lynen fellowship from the Humboldt foundation and worked at the University Koper, Slovenia. She was a fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena in 2012/13. Since 2014, she has been the editor (and since 2009 the chief editor) of the quarterly journal Südosteuropa. Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft. Her research focusses on comparative 19th, 20th and 21st century European social and cultural history. Her main research interests are work (in Habsburg Trieste, forced labour under the Nazis in Yugoslavia, port and dockyard workers in Yugoslavia during the Cold War), wars (the Balkan Wars, the Second World War and the wars in former Yugoslavia) and borders (with a focus on the north-eastern Adriatic region).
Her research project at re:work analyses the milieus of port and dockyard workers during the cold war in Rijeka (Croatia) and Koper (Slovenia) in Yugoslavia, as well as in Trieste and Monfalcone in Italy. Her focus lies on how worker milieus were (re)constructed and working relations (re)established along the Italian-Yugoslav border, i.e. in a multi-ethnic border region that was constitutionally, politically and nationally contested after the war and until at least 1954. How was a new social order constructed on both sides of the ideological divide, albeit with numerous points of contact? How were workers integrated into the new social frameworks? The comparative micro-study of working class milieus on both sides of this relatively open border between East and West has a methodological potential which could well be harnessed for future research. The approach combines changes to and the (re-)constitution of local work relations with more general processes of transformation in post-war Italian and Yugoslav society. The project aims to bring dictatorship and democracy into relation and, not least, help overcome the still dominant bi-polar mental map of the Cold War, that is, to help develop a future pan-European concept of the post-1945 history of labour.
Publications
Violence in Late Socialist Public Spheres [= Special Issue European History Quarterly, 42 (2)], ed., 2015.
‘Containing Conflict and Enforcing Consent in Titoist Yugoslavia. The 1970 Dockworkers’ Strike in Koper (Slovenia)’. European History Quarterly 45, no. 2 (2015): 275–94.
‘Epistemologische Grenzen und europäische Zeitgeschichte am Beispiel der nordöstlichen Adriaregion’. Europa Regional 22.2014, no. 3–4 (2015): 192–206.
‘Versponnene Fäden. Kriegsnarrative im jugoslawischen Raum’. In Traumata der Transition. Der Untergang Jugoslawiens in interdisziplinärer Sicht, edited by Svjetlan Lacko Vidulić and Boris Previšić, 133–60. Tübingen: Francke, 2015.
‘„Unsere abgebrochene Südostecke ...“ Bergbau im nördlichen Jugoslawien (Slowenien) unter deutscher Besatzung (1941-1945)’. In Arbeit im Nationalsozialismus, edited by Marc Buggeln and Michael Wildt, 273–92. Göttingen: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014.
‘Nationalism in Southeast Europe since 1970’. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism, edited by John Breuilly, 515–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Beyond the Balkans. Towards an Inclusive History of Southeastern Europe, ed. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2010.
Kultur - Nation - Milieu. Sozialdemokratie in Triest vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Essen: Klartext, 2004.
Last updated: April 09, 2016
Dr. James Williams
جامعة زايد (Zayed University), Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Nightwatching. Male Migrant Networks and the Sustenance of Brotherhood in Cape Town
James Williams received his PhD in anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University in 2013. His research examines the economic operations of transnational networks of unaccompanied male migrant youth in Cape Town. Accompanying the migrants as they work and survive in South Africa’s urban underworld, his research explores how these youths navigate a hostile urban landscape collaboratively to mitigate risk and evade state surveillance, and how they organize themselves as deft, entrepreneurial networks to generate incomes.
His research project at re:work is titled Nightwatching: Male Migrant Networks and the Sustenance of Brotherhood in Cape Town. It focuses on how the youths reside discreetly within and across various bachelor households in Cape Town. It will take the lens of the lifecourse to explore the domesticities such forms of male migrant homemaking and householding generate and foreclose. It draws from ethnographic research conducted in South Africa since 2007.
James is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University, Dubai. He also serves as an advisor of the Young African Scholars Program at the Harry F. Guggenheim Foundation.
Publications
with Felicitas Hentschke, eds. To Be at Home. House, Work, and Self in the Modern World. München: De Gruyter Verlag Oldenbourg 2018.(Work in Global and Historical Perspective, Vol. 5).
‘Evil’. In The SAGE Encyclopedia of War. Social Science Perspectives, edited by Paul Joseph and J. Geoffrey Golson, n/s. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, forthcoming.
‘Poor Men with Money. On the Politics of Not Studying the Poorest of the Poor in Urban South Africa’. Current Anthropology 56, no. S11 (2015): 24–32.
with Pamela Reynolds. ‘Youth. Urban’. In New Encyclopedia of Africa, edited by John Middleton and Joseph C. Miller, 2nd ed., vol. 5: 293–96. Detroit, MI: Scribner’s Sons, 2008.
Last updated: January 15, 2019