This year, University of Notre Dame history students led by Professors Alexander Martin and Jaime Pensado once again met with history and sociology students from Bielefeld University for a stimulating three-day workshop in Germany on May 16-21, 2024. The workshop featured 18 papers from graduate students and faculty, covering topics as diverse as the memorialization of famine in post-Soviet spaces, social identities in late Byzantium, and religious labor riots in the Slavic Rust Belt.
Thanks to generous funding from the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, six graduate students and two faculty members traveled to Bielefeld to share their works-in-progress with international peers, discover the surrounding northwestern region of Germany, and savor local culture with guidance from their hosts at Bielefeld. Three more faculty members were able to join the workshop sessions on Zoom. Dr. Bettina Brandt and Prof. Frank Grüner, historians at Bielefeld, and Alexander Martin, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and faculty fellow at the Nanovic Institute, were the chief architects of this year’s workshop, with Dr. Brandt taking charge of events on the ground in Bielefeld.
This year’s workshop was the 15th time the two universities came together for an intellectual and cultural exchange. The workshop first took place in 2010, originally devised by Semion Lyandres, professor of history at Notre Dame and faculty fellow at the Nanovic Institute. Since then, the workshop has alternated between meetings at Notre Dame and Bielefeld, except when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the event to move online temporarily.
Learning together at the workshop
Ph.D. students and professors presented papers that were discussed after brief initial comments by the presenter and a colleague. Each paper was an opportunity to learn something new, demonstrating the vastness of the historical profession. The participants probably took a lesson in humility realizing how much collaboration the field needs, and how little historians can advance knowledge by themselves.
From 15th-century European warfare to Catholic immigrant communities in the American Midwest during the early 20th century, the discussions covered a wide chronological and geographical range of topics. Likewise, the discussants tried to think through different historical lenses: how would a historian of 19th-century Russia approach the identity of the Argentine middle class in the 1970s? Or, how would an expert in 19th-century Eastern European nationalism understand the musealization of historical famines?
Each paper was an opportunity to learn something new, demonstrating the vastness of the historical profession. The participants probably took a lesson in humility realizing how much collaboration the field needs, and how little historians can advance knowledge by themselves.
Discussions were driven by a productive synergy between two different ways of writing history: while Notre Dame participants engaged thoroughly with primary sources and historiographic intervention, their Bielefeld peers contributed a deep understanding of theory and sociological concepts. This ensured that discussants offered genuinely fresh perspectives and—thanks to the interdisciplinary makeup of the group—pointed to further research possibilities that had hitherto remained unexplored.
As new avenues for research came into view over the three days of workshops, participants forged transatlantic friendships, which they were then able to nurture during excursions and cultural trips around the region.
Diving into the history of the region
During one such excursion, Bielefeld Ph.D. students gave a tour to their Notre Dame visitors through Bielefeld’s old town, including its medieval castle and the astonishing views of the city from its hill. During the break day, participants visited the Wewelsburg, just an hour’s drive from Bielefeld. Built in the early 17th century, the Wewelsburg Renaissance castle was refurbished by the SS in the late 1930s as an academy and cult-site of this Nazi organization. Heinrich Himmler ordered the construction of a concentration camp in this small town, using the inmates, most of them Jehovah’s Witnesses, for the renovation of the castle. Students and professors walked through the village and visited its museum, dedicated to the memory of victims of the Holocaust.
After a typical German lunch at the Detmold Open-Air Museum, surrounded by historical buildings from the 16th and 17th centuries, students and professors attended a historical dancing workshop at a castle in nearby Lemgo. Feeling like 17th-century aristocrats, participants followed the teachers’ instructions, both in German and English, to join a group dance.
This year’s workshop concluded on May 21st, with the departure of Notre Dame students and faculty from Bielefeld. Owing to the diversity of thought and experience at the workshop everyone was able to learn something new, not only from their own panel but also from every other discussion—there was always something to jot down, something to highlight in another participant’s paper, some history to understand, something cultural to experience. Here is to next year at Notre Dame!
