This conference is intended to provide an opportunity to address the relationships between practices and practioners of history in Britain and Germany. Its purpose is to gauge the significance of mutual exchanges - of dialogues, controversies, perceptions and collaborative projects.
A growing body of work has sought to investigate the linkages between historiography and nationalism in general, and between the historical imagination and the imagining of nations in particular. both institutionally and intellectually, history was 'nationalised' in the course of its nineteenth-century professionalisation even while historians began, at least in some contexts, to think of themselves as belonging to a single cosmopolitan community of scholarship. To an extraordinary degree, the pursuit of history has continued to carry a baggage of national tradition ever since. But even over periods during which aggressive nationalism in German and British political cultures poisoned mutual cademic relations, historians remained aware of one another's agendas and publications. Nationalist commitments themselves might give rise to inwardnesses and provoke the denunciation of 'alien' intellectual currents under certain circumstances, but prompt emulation under others. And, of course, historians have not all been equally indebted to 'their' national traditions of historical scholarship any more than they have all been self-consciously nationalist.
The conference is therefore exploring why some intellectual departures and innovations emanating from, say, Germany were positively received in Britain and others ignored. How far were particular institutes, organisations, and indeed individual historians responsible for making specific academic 'products' of one country accessible in the other? How far were imported historical works or approaches to history re- and even misinterpreted? When and why have there been significant instances of the policing of the other? By drawing also on examples of links and debates beyond the boundaries of the academy, we hope to open up such questions as whether the institutional cultures of the discipline or wider political cultures might explain varying degrees of receptivity to ideas of 'foreign' origin.
Participants include
Any further information can be obtained from either Stefan Berger, University of Wales, Cardiff, School of European Studies, P.O. Box 908, Cardiff CF1 3YQ, Tel: 01222-257368; 01222-875405, Fax: 01222- 874946; E-mail: berger@cardiff.ac.uk or from Peter Lambert, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Dept. of History and Welsh History, Hugh Owen Building, Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3DY, Telephone: 01970-622662, Fax: 01970-622676.
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