Booking is essential, refreshments provided.
The Thyssen Lecture Series is organised by the German Historical Institute London in collaboration with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. The theme of this lecture series is Science, Knowledge, and the Legacy of Empire. Initially given at Bloomsbury Square, each lecture will be repeated at a British university outside Greater London. The idea behind taking the lecture out of London is twofold. Firstly, it connects the speakers with universities and departments outside the Greater London Area and enables students of history from universities outside the so-called golden triangle to have access to lectures by distinguished internal scholars from the field. Secondly, it strengthens the GHIL's networks with these universities.
The 2024 lecture will be delivered by Professor Gudrun Kraemer on “Local Modernity: Agency, Entanglement, and the Making of the Modern Middle East”. Professor Kraemer is a distinguished historian of the Middle East, modernity and Islam. Gudrun Krämer is Professor Emerita of Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, where she taught from 1996 to 2019 and directed the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies from 2007 to 2018. A former visiting scholar in Beijing, Beirut, Bologna, Cairo, Delhi, Erfurt, Jakarta, Paris, and most recently Salzburg, she is also a member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and associated member of the Tunisian Academy of the Arts and Humanities, a member of the German National Research Council and executive editor of the Encyclopaedia of Islam Three. In 2006, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Tashkent Islamic University, Uzbekistan, and in 2010, she received the Gerda Henkel Prize for her achievements in the historical humanities.
For the 2024 Thyssen Lecture, the German Historical Institute has chosen the Department of History at the University of Nottingham to host the lecture on 22 October. The Institute has had close academic collaboration with Dr Arun Kumar in the past and aims to develop closer ties with the history department and other humanities and social science departments at the University of Nottingham.