OPUS Workshop: Writing India into Global History with Sebastian Conrad; 26 February 2024 [Closed-door]

This workshop will focus on the scholarship of Sebastian Conrad and his writings conceptualizing the politics and methodology of global history. The participants will engage with non-Western experiences in writing global history, particularly the site of India. The readings demonstrate how intellectual networks connect India and Japan’s histories with the twentieth century’s global structures. In the session, the participants will engage with case studies from scholarship on global history to discuss – tools within global history to counter Eurocentrism;  how to study the continuities and breaks between globalization and the impetus to write global history; situate the post-colonial currents and the move towards (de) colonization; how to locate the national within the global.

Sebastian Conrad is a professor of history at the Free University of Berlin. He holds the Chair of Modern History at Freie Universität Berlin. He joined the faculty in 2010 after teaching for several years at the European University Institute in Florence. He was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études in Paris, and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara; in the spring 2017, he held the Theodor Heuss Chair at the New School, New York.

Sebastian Conrad is the director of the  MA “Global History” , a joint-degree program at Free University and Humboldt University, Berlin; he is also the director of the graduate school  “Global Intellectual History.” 

 He is on the editorial board of  History and Society , of  Past & Present  (2012-2019), of  Modern Intellectual History , and of  Esboços: histories in global contexts . Together with Margrit Pernau, he is the editor of the  book series Globalgeschichte  (Campus publishers). He is an elected member of the  Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , and of the Academia Europaea. He is the author of German Colonialism: A Short History, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany, and The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century.