Research Synthesis & Cross-Cutting Topics

The main research programme’s four research units are embedded in an overarching structure that relates to the main programme in three ways:

  1. it aims to synthesize the emerging results in the four research units;
  2. it focuses on cross-cutting issues that affect several research units;
  3. it examines both broader and more specific questions related to the overall programme and thus complements the four thematic units conceptually and methodologically.

The researchers at ZMO cooperate in different ways across all research units. In the past they have jointly published edited volumes or papers and they organised several conferences together. A number of third-party funded or individual research projects complement the main research programme.

 

Research on Translocality

"Translocality" is a central concept to ZMO's current research programme. The term has been substantially developed at ZMO during the past years. It allows to perceive Globalisation as a number of overlaying, cross-border processes of circulation and exclusion, contrary to the often teleological and eurocentric perception of Globalisation.

Currently, two researchers are working on comprehensive questions on Translocality.  Prof. Dr. Ulrike Freitag deals with aspects of Saudi-Arabian cultural history in the context of exchange processes in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea regions.

The research of PD Stefan B. Kirmse on  Eurasian Borderlands, Past and Present  examines youth in the Soviet south and 'minorities' in imperial space.

The Long End of the First World War

This volume, edited by Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Heike Liebau (all ZMO) and Anorthe Wetzel focuses on the relation between global history and social history, highlighting actors and regions, and it systematically engages with the issue of diverse periodizations. In discussing linkages between experience, historiography and commemoration, the contributions in this volume aim at unsettling the notion of a static and clearly defined "end" of the War, a construct mainly based on European developments.

 

Conference "Claiming and Making Muslim Worlds: Across and Between the Local and the Global"

In the final year of the main research programme "Muslim Worlds - World of Islam? Conceptions, Practices, and Crises of the Global", this conference was held from 3 - 5 April 2019 at ZMO. In eight panels, researchers dicussed their perspectives on Muslim societies an their regional interconnections. Currently, a small group of editors, headed by Prof. Dr. Ulrike Freitag, is working on a special edited volume.

A conference report can be found in the Orient Bulletin Nr. 36 from July 2019.