Keynotes

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Hedwig Richter: How to study political history today? Democracy as embodied practice and national experience  

Thursday 23rd, 16:15

 

To analyze the crises of democracy in a more accurate way, it is important to look at the history of democracy. It is an “impure” history, a history comprising a disorderly conglomeration of concepts and practices that often contradicted each other. The liberal democracy that emerged from this history, with human dignity at its centre, therefore turns out to be a patchwork, a structure struggling for balance. 

Hedwig Richter is professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Universität der Bundeswehr in München

 

 

 

 

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Judith Pollman & Henk te Velde: How to write a long-term history of the political? What modernist can learn from early modernists

Friday 24th, 09:40

A conversation with Judith Pollmann moderated by Henk te Velde about innovation, citizenship and the promixity of politics.

 

        

Judith Pollmann and Henk te Velde are both professor at the Leiden University Institute for History

 

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Beatrice de Graaf

Friday 24th, 15:30

How the global and the transimperial affect political history – positively. With a case study on collective security after 1815

Prof. De Graaf will address the issue how we might use the approach of global and transimperial history to go back in time and change the questions we ask in the political history of the 19th century.  How should historians of politics respond to the need to both ‘de-center’ and ‘transnationalize’ the history of Europe? How can a global and transimperial history of politics challenge categories of political analysis that take European developments, such as democratization, colonial competition as the norm? Based on current research on collective security in the early 19th century prof. De Graaf will explore how master narratives can be read against the grain and new plots emerge.”

 

Beatrice de Graaf is professor of international and political history at Utrecht University