Birgit Kolboske: Hierarchies. The Max Planck Society in Gender Trouble. Göttingen: V&R 2024.

 Birgit Kolboske: Hierarchies. The Max Planck Society in Gender Trouble. Göttingen: V&R 2024. ISBN 978-3-666-30259-6. Open access (https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/book/10.13109/9783666302596)

The Max Planck Society (MPG), one of the most successful research institutions worldwide, serves as a prime example of the German science system, in which hierarchies and relations of dependency play a major role. This body stands center stage in the present book, which analyzes processes of socio-cultural and structural transformation at the MPG during the first fifty years of its existence—from the non-transparent interdependencies typical of informal networks to a modern research institution geared towards gender equality policy. Two women’s working worlds within this research organization are analyzed through a cultural history and history-of-science lens. One of them, science, was long closed to all but a tiny number of women. The other was the office, where most women in this context worked most of the time. What promoted female scientific careers at the MPG, what obstructed them, and what role did the »Harnack Principle,« the MPG’s own structural principle of the personality-centered organization of research, play in these processes? The book also foregrounds the negotiation of gender equality processes beginning in the late 1980s, which helped break down the traditional gender order and trigger a cultural shift at the Max Planck Society.

Ivo Cerman, Conference Report: Natural Law and Enlightenment Universities in East-Central Europe

Ivo Cerman, Conference Report: Natural Law and Enlightenment Universities in East-Central Europe, in: H-Soz-Kult, 01.11.2024, http://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-150964.

Denis J. B. Shaw. Reconnoitring Russia: Mapping, Exploring and Describing Early Modern Russia, 1613–1825.

Denis J. B. Shaw. Reconnoitring Russia: Mapping, Exploring and Describing Early Modern Russia, 1613–1825. London: UCL Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781800085923

open access: https://uclpress.co.uk/book/reconnoitring-russia/

Like many European countries during the Great Age of Discovery and Exploration, Russia embarked on policies of state building, exploration and imperial expansion. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the territory under Moscow’s control was about twenty thousand square kilometres. By 1800 Russia’s empire had expanded to some eighteen million square kilometres. Russia had thus become one of the world’s greatest empires.

By focusing on such geographical practices as exploring, observing, describing, mapping and similar activities, Reconnoitring Russia seeks to explain how Russia’s rulers and its educated public came to know and understand the territory of their expanding state and empire, especially as a result of the modernizing policies of such sovereigns as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. It places the Russian experience into a comparative context, showing how that experience compares with those of other European countries over the same period. The book adopts a broad chronological framework, exploring the age between 1613 when the Romanov dynasty assumed power and 1825, the conclusion of Alexander I’s reign, or what is often termed the end of the ‘long eighteenth century’.

Praise for Reconnoitring Russia

Reconnoitring Russia is an original contribution to two fields of scholarship: history of geography as a science and practices of exploration, and the history of the Russian Empire. The author was one of the most devoted historians of the geography of Russia and this is the first comprehensive analysis of the development of geographical knowledge in the period under study to be published either in English or in Russian.’

Julia Lajus, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences and Humanities (NIAS) in Amsterdam

Ere Nokkala, Jonas Gerlings (eds.) The Process of Enlightenment

 Ere Nokkala, Jonas Gerlings (eds.) The Process of Enlightenment. Essays by and inspired by Hans Erich Bödeker. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2024. ISBN: 9781802071863

The historiographical concept “Enlightenment” has for a long time wavered between the idea of a single unified Enlightenment and the notion of multiple competing enlightenments. This volume revisits this seeming contradiction by asserting that the Enlightenment should be understood as a shared process of communication, seeking ways to accommodate and mediate rival ideologies and orient enlightenment projects towards the betterment of humankind.

Taking the work of the eminent Enlightenment scholar Hans Erich Bödeker as their point of departure, the different chapters seek to explore this perspective through specific case studies of political communication. Readers are offered a selection of Bödeker’s texts never previously translated into English, along with a series of contributions from his former colleagues, students, and collaborators. In doing so the book displays the broad scope of Bödeker’s own work, as well as the multiplicity of themes captured within the framework of the Enlightenment. Genres, modes, and strategies of communication are contrasted with the institutions and cultural practices underpinning them.

In exploring the depth and scope of Bödeker’s work, the volume pays tribute to a German tradition rooted in historical semantics, while at the same time querying its present state and its future.

So glad to have participated in this project and excited to have my copy of our new book in hand! JONAS GERLINGS and ERE NOKKALA, Introduction: Enlightenment as process

ANTHONY J. LA VOPA, Aufklärung reconceived: the contribution of Hans Erich Bödeker

I. Enlightenment as a process of communication

HANS ERICH BÖDEKER, Enlightenment as a process of communication

AVI LIFSCHITZ, Pitfalls of a communication process: the illicit publication of Frederick II’s writings

JONAS GERLINGS, Critique as a process of Enlightenment: Kant’s philosophising as communication

LÁSZLÓ KONTLER, Entretiens with Fontenelle, 1688-1803: translating politeness into science

THOMAS KAUFMANN, The early-eighteenth-century image of Luther and the Reformation

PATRICE VEIT, The concert as cultural practice

ANNE SAADA, Göttingen before Göttingen: the negotiation of the imperial university privilege

II. Enlightenment as a process of politicisation

HANS ERICH BÖDEKER, Reinhart Koselleck’s Enlightenment

HELGE JORDHEIM, Communication, politicisation, Enlightenment: Vertrag on the move

MARTIN GIERL, Monks, Jews, polemics, Enlightenment

ADRIANA LUNA-FABRITIUS, Visions of sociability in early modern Neapolitan political thought

ERE NOKKALA, The politicisation of the Enlightenment in Sweden: political culture, publicity and freedom of the press

HAGEN SCHULZ-FORBERG, The inequalities of progress: Jean-Baptiste Say’s theory of capitalism and the entrepreneur

HANS ERICH BÖDEKER, Enlightenment and modernity: an essay

Leszek Zasztowt: Under a Double Headed Eagle: Józef Mianowski. Biography of a Conservative.

Leszek Zasztowt: Under a Double Headed Eagle: Józef Mianowski. Biography of a Conservative. Amsterdam: Brill 2024. ISBN: 978-3-506-79472-7

What was life like in the territories annexed by Russia in the 19th century? What were the views and attitudes of the Poles living in lands belonging to the Russian Empire? How did people arrange their lives when they did not take up revolutionary action and foreswore an open struggle with the Tsarist regime? Could one be a Polish patriot without fighting gun in hand for independence? The Russians believed that Poles were genetically preordained to be anti-Russian. Even in the west of Europe this charge of morbid Russophobia was taken to be the rule. It seems that this was one of the greatest falsehoods that Russian imperial propaganda managed to implement in the West. Leszek Zasztowt unfolds in this fascinating biography a much more complex reality through the life story of the medical scientist, academic and political activist Józef Mianowski (1804–1879), a man who served Russia and loved Poland.

cfa: (Re)Gendering Science: Policies, Practices and Discourses in Socialist Context and Beyond

 ❗️❗️❗️Open call for papers: 

📌History of Communism in Europe no. 16/2025

(Re)Gendering Science: Policies, Practices and Discourses in Socialist Context and Beyond

✒️Coordinators: dr. Irina Nastasa-Matei & dr. Luciana Jinga 

This call for papers invites contributors for a special issue of the scientific journal History of Communism in Europe, focusing on the relationship between women and science in socialist contexts. We aim to explore how women engaged with science both within national contexts (in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, or the Global South), and in transnational contexts (whether within the framework of socialist movements and organizations or through academic networks and scientific collaborations that included women from socialist countries and/or took place in these regions).

Image: Raluca Ripan and her students

Photo credits: Dolgozó nő [The Working Woman], 1960

URL: https://www.iiccmer.ro/publicatii/2024/open-call-for-papers-history-of-communism-in-europe-no-16-2025/

hybrid lecture: Anna Sokolova: Wild Crop Socialism: Consumer Cooperation, Food Security, and Transnational Networks in Cold War Soviet Union

Wild Crop Socialism: Consumer Cooperation, Food Security, and Transnational Networks in Cold War Soviet Union

Anna Sokolova,

University of Ostrava

November 6th, 2024. Wednesday, 15.00-16.30

Room XH114 (Refresh Social Lab), Building XH - Havlíčkovo nábřeží 3120, FA UO. for online access contact https://ff.osu.cz/chsd/viktor-pal/93696/.

The Soviet Union was known for its large-scale resource extraction, particularly timber and hydrocarbons. These industries supported new technologies, infrastructures, and workforce flows. However, small-scale resource extraction, initiated by the Soviet state through the Consumer Cooperation Union (Tsentrosoyz), impacted natural environments and society differently. This system involved numerous pickers gathering and trading wild crops for cash and imported industrial goods. This system created a network of individual economic agents operating within each region and established links with trading counterparts worldwide. This talk, I will explore how this wild crop economy captured the complex social and economic processes of the late Soviet Union and how this knowledge can help us understand the different paths taken by the former Soviet republics as independent states in the post-Soviet transition.

Anna Sokolova a social and environmental historian of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. She received her PhD from the University of Zürich. Anna is currently a senior researcher at the University of Ostrava.

Organized by the Department of History, Centre for Economic and Social History. Hosted by the Centre for the Philosophy of Historiography.