Activities and upcoming events

We are looking forward to the upcoming workshop “Staging Enmity: From Representation to Projection” of our second research focus of the RTG . This workshop engages in the connection between enmity and representation. Focusing on questions like “In what context is enmity staged?” or “How should we understand the impact on, and agency of, the targets of enmity representation?“.

Program

The workshop takes place at the HCTS (Voßstrasse 2) in Room 400.02.12 on the 24th and 25th January. You can register via 

ambivalent-enmity@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de

For a more profound description of the upcoming workshop our Mercator Fellow Dr. Lola Guyot provided a keynote explaining the topics, questions and goals of the workshop. 

Dr. Lola Guyot Keynote - Abstract

We are glad to announce our upcoming workshop “Meeting the Enemy at the Border: The Relational Dynamics of Contact Zones” of our third research focus of the RTG. 

Program

The workshop takes place at the Völkerkundemuseum VPST (Hauptstraße 235) on the 12th and 13th December. You can register via 

ambivalent-enmity@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de

We are delighted to announce, that Dr. Ahmed Mansour is going to hold a Fireside Chat with the title Preventing Extremism on the 6th December 2024.

Dr. Ahmed Mansour is a psychologist, bestselling author and has a Dr. theol. h. c. from the University of Basel. His work focuses on preventing extremism, especially Islamic extremism. He is Founder and CEO of Mind (Mansour-Initiative für Demokratieförderung und Extremismusprävention), which offers young adults and teenagers as well as workers from psycho therapy, pedagogy and management, who had experience with migration, extremism and violence, the opportunity to think independently and reflected.

The chat is going to take place at the HCTS, Room 400.02.12 at 12:30 a.m.

Please register until the 2nd December 2024.

Register

The HfjS is going to hold a workshop about Antisemitism in Scholarship and the Arts with intriguing panels and engaging talks (e.g. featuring Aleida Assman from the University of Konstanz).

Program

The workshop is going to take place at the HfjS at 9:30 a.m till 6 p.m.

Please register until the 21st October 2024.

Register

Start of eventseries on the topic „Antisemitism in Scholarship and the Arts“. On the 25th of October 2024 Hito Steyerl will hold a lecture on the topic the Empty Center. This will be followed by the vernisage of her exhibition „Normalität“ at Heidelberger Kunstverein on the 26th of October 2024 and the upcoming Workshop "Debates on Antisemitism in Scholarship and the Arts at Hochschule für Jüdische Studien on the 28th October 2024. 

Heidelberger Kunstverein

This week we are able to present to you our upcoming colloquium for the winter term 2024/2025.

During this semester, starting on the 14th of October, the doctoral researchers of the RTG “Ambivalent Enmity” will present their process and dissertation projects. We will also have interesting guest lecturers, who will inform us about collaborative research projects such as the Horizon Arenas-Project.

The colloquium takes place every Monday at 2 p.m.-4 p.m. at HCTS Room 400.02.12. 

Program

We are delighted to announce, that our Affiliated Researcher Dr. Lily Eilan is going to give a lecture about The Sacred Tie between the Druzes and the Jews? A Re-evaluation.

Dr. Lily Eilan has a B.A. in Middle Eastern studies in the Hebrew University and a M.phil. in Middle Eastern studies at Oxford University. Her research focus is on the Social History of the Western Galilee 1936-76.

The lecture is going to take place at the HfJS, S4 at 4 p.m. We are looking forward to every participant.

We are thrilled to invite you to a showing of the most recent documentary The Specter of Populism by Dr. Jürgen Schaflechner. There will also be a unique opportunity for discussion after the showing.

The film is going to be shown at the HCTS, Room 400.00.12 at 6 p.m.

Populism has become one of the most debated political terms of the last decade and populist demands have become political realities. From Brazil, through India to the USA populists have gained political traction. On the other hand, the politics of these and similar governments have sparked unlikely alliances of people from all backgrounds fighting against oppression. In the light of these developments, should we still speak of populism as a political zeitgeist? With the help of experts from fields such as Political Sciences, Philosophy, Anthropology, and History this documentary film will shine a spotlight on the complex theories of populist politics and their significance for our current political nexus.

Dr. Jürgen Schaflechner is the research group leader of Social and Cultural Anthropology, FU Berlin. He and his team study the political and social movements of religious minorities in South Asia in the advent of social media and communicative capitalism. Jürgen has also filmed, edited, and produced six documentary films on topics such as the alleged forced conversion of Hindu women to Islam in Sindh, the life-worlds of Pakistani Hindu refugees in India, and the sacrificial rites amongst the Devapujak-Vagri community in Karachi. If you would like to find out more about him and his work find more information here:
 

Jürgen Schaflechner

The following day Prof. Dr. Liat Kozma is offering a Workshop on Archival Research in the Modern Middle East.

The Workshop is taking place on the 23rd May 2024, Hannah-Arendt-Saal HfJS Heidelberg (Landfriedstraße 12) from 9:45 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. Feel free to join per registration trough 

registration@hfjs.eu

We are excited to welcome Prof. Dr. Liat Kozma, Associated Professor of the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. She is going to talk about The Formation of the Palestinian Refugee Crisis and the International Red Cross, 1949-1950.

Prof. Dr. Liat Kozma´s research is focused on feminism in contemporary Morocco, marginalized women in nineteenth-century Egypt, and medical discourses on sexuality in both the Jewish Yishuv and in early twentieth-century Arab societies. 

More Information

The lecture is going to take place at the Historisches Seminar, Lecture Hall (Grabengasse 3-5) from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. We are looking forward to every participant.

This week we are able to present to you our upcoming colloquium for the summer term 2024.

Starting on 22 April 2024, at 2 PM with a seminar by Prof. em. Vamik Volkan, who will be speaking on the formation and understanding of large group identity. There are more compelling seminars to come, which are presented on our colloquium´s schedule. Every seminar contributes a different, from ethnic to religious, perspective towards our topic, i.e. Dr. Lola Guyot, our Mercator Fellow, will be speaking about Hindu nationalism and the Muslim ´enemy´ in the United Kingdom or another example: Dr. Dmytro Tytarenko, Dr. Tetiana Perga and Dr. Tetiana Pastuschenko will be speaking about Personal Perspectives on the Russian War in Ukraine.

The colloquium will take place every Monday in the HCTS in Room 400.02.12, Voßstr. 2, Building 4400 from 2PM to 4PM.

This week we are able to present to you Prof. em. Vamık Volkan, who will be speaking on the formation and understanding of large group identity, i. e. our sense of self within society, and its relevancy in our lives.

The seminar will take place on 22 April 2024, at 2 PM. You may access it via Zoom with this link. Alternatively, you may take part in the seminar at HCTS in Room 400.002.12, Voßstr. 2, Building 4400.

Vamık Volkan is a professor emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia and has dedicated his life to the establishment of dialogue and mutual understanding in conflict scenarios. He is the founder of the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI) and has won multiple awards and honors for his work toward conflict resolution.

Prof. Volkan will also be speaking at the German-American Institute (DAI) in Heidelberg two days later, on 24 April 2024. Tickets may be purchased here.

We are excited to welcome Prof. Dr. Viktoriya Sereda, head of the Virtual Ukraine Institute for Advanced Studies (VUIAS), and Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Nobel-Prize awarded Center for Civil Liberties (CCL), to a roundtable on “Ukrainian-Russian Enmity and Entanglement”.

The event will take place on February 22, 2024, 18:00 CET.

The roundtable will be conducted online via Zoom! Please register with: 

ambivalent-enmity@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de

Viktoriya Sereda is sociologist and currently Head Coordinator at the VUIAS. Since February 2022, Prof. Sereda has led research into the fate suffered by the Ukrainian population displaced by Russia’s invasion of the country.

Oleksandra Matviichuk is a human rights lawyer and activists who is head of the Center for Civil Liberties in Kyiv, which was awarded the Noble Prize in 2022. It is one of her greatest concerns to document the war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine, for which she and the Center have already conducted numerous witness interviews and collected evidence.

The roundtable we announced in our last post has now been published in full length on the official Heidelberg University YouTube channel.

We highly recommend the deep insights provided by renowned Ukrainian sociologist Prof. Dr. Viktoriya Sereda, Oleksandra Matviichuk from the Nobel Prize winning Center for Civil Liberties as well as Prof. Dr. Tanja Penter.

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Corry Guttstadt as the next guest in our recurring Fireside Chats! This time we will have the opportunity to speak and hear more about the state of antisemitism in Turkish and Muslim societies. The event will take place on February 7 at 2 p.m. in Room S4 at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien.

Please register under the following e-mail address: 

ambivalent-enmity@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de

Corry Guttstadt is a renowned turcologist and historian. Her research is focused on the situation of minorities in Türkiye, antisemitism and the history of Sephardic Jews. She is currently associated with the ikw Hamburg as well as a former Senior Fellow with the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute on Holocaust Studies and has led the Türkei-Europa-Zentrum in Hamburg.

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Matthew Vollgraff for a lecture on the topic of “The Imperial Childhood of World Art: Revisiting Karl Lamprecht’s ‘Hall of Culture’ Exhibition”. The event will take place on December 19 at 6 p.m. in Room 400.02.12 at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (Voßstr. 2, Building 4400, Second floor).

Matthew Vollgraff is a cultural historian who specializes in the science, politics, and visual culture of modern central Europe. He is a NOMIS fellow at the University of Basel, currently working on a new book project titled Migration as Method: Diffusionism and the Global Politics of the Deep Past, 1890–1960.

In the summer of 1914, just months before the outbreak of the First World War, the first comparative exhibition of ‘world art history’ opened at an international trade fair in Leipzig. Curated by the historian Karl Lamprecht, this ‘Hall of Culture’ was an unusually cosmopolitan affair that showcased photographic reproductions of artworks from ancient Greece, India, China, Japan, Mesoamerica, and prehistoric Europe. Yet all of this was organized around an unlikely core: Lamprecht’s prodigious collection of drawings by children from all over the globe, intended to serve as comparative indices of ethnic or national mental ‘development’. Taking this long-overlooked exhibition as its focus, this talk sites the origins of the discourse on ‘world art’ at the perilous convergence of universal history, child psychology and the imperial politics of the late Wilhelmine Empire. The 1914 exhibition was not only rooted in paternalistic colonial imaginaries but also in Lamprecht’s concrete policies for cultural imperialism abroad, which carried the covert support by the Foreign Office. Ultimately the forgotten history of the ‘Hall of Culture’ exhibition offers an alternative genealogy of global art history that emerges from the conflicted encounter between Enlightenment ideals and colonial relations.

We are delighted to welcome Prof. Dr. Brahim El Guabli and Alessia Colonnelli for a roundtable on the topic of “Amazigh Soft Power: How Moroccan Imazighen Used Traditional Channels to Make Change”.

The event will take place online on December 13 at 4 p.m. via Zoom.

Prof. Dr. Brahim El Guabli is an Associate Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College, Massachusetts, USA. His research encompasses areas of language politics, indigeneity,  human rights, transitional justice, political violence, archive creation, memory studies, Amazigh/Berber literatures, and environmental humanities.

Professor El Guabli and our doctoral candidate Alessia Colonnelli will discuss the dynamics of conflict and bottom-up empowerment of the Amazigh identity movement in Morocco, by addressing the politics of identity in contemporary North Africa. Different patterns of conflict between the state and Moroccan indigenous Amazigh communities, as well as repertoires of soft power that Amazigh communities have resorted to exert pressure for a progressive recognition of Amazigh linguistic, cultural, and indigenous rights, will be discussed.

On November 30, 2023, 5 p.m. we will be celebrating the official opening of our Research Training Group in the Grand Hall (Alte Aula) of Heidelberg University.

We are delighted that we were able to win Derek J. Penslar (Harvard University) for the keynote speech. He will deliver a lecture entitled “BETWEEN AMITY AND ENMITY: JEWISH AND ARAB MUTUAL PERCEPTIONS IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Derek J. Penslar is William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University. He is known for his comparative and transnational approaches. He is currently working on a book on the worldwide reactions to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

The jazz pianist Dan Popek will provide the musical programme.

Registration with registration(at)hfjs.eu is required.

Program

We are excited to welcome Dr. Irena Kalhousová, head of the Herzl Center for Israel Studies in Prague, to give a lecture on “Trauma and Foreign Policy: Israel and the Gaza Strip”.

20 November 2023, 18:15 CET
Hannah-Arendt-Saal, Hochschule für Jüdische Studien, Landfriedstraße 12

Registration with registration(at)hfjs.eu is required.
The event can also be followed via live stream on request.