Events 2024-25

Upcoming Events, Autumn 2024

17 September, 10:15 a.m. SEMINAR - HYBRID EVENT
Linn Holmberg, Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of History of Ideas, Stockholm University
The Dictionary Craze in Enlightenment Europe, 1665–1789: the Reception and Cultural
Impact of an Information Technology during its ‘Big Break’
Zoom Webinar: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/65802739142
ABSTRACT:
We live in an era when information technologies develop faster than ever before and worries
about their impact are omnipresent. Among the tech optimists, however, the main lesson
learned from history seems to be that ‘people have always worried’, thus suggesting that
worries always (even now) are exaggerated, misdirected, and conservative. But this assump-
tion can be challenged if delving deep into the historical periods when other information tech-
nologies first got their ‘big break’. 
       In this talk, I will present the results of a five-year research project devoted to the eigh-
teenth-century ‘Dictionary craze’. From the late seventeenth century onwards, alphabetically-
organized reference-works multiplied on European book markets to such a degree that con-
temporaries called it a craze, mania, or epidemic. While some believed that dictionaries would
bring about a revolution in learning, others saw them as a threat to everything that learning
stood for. In hindsight, it is tempting to interpret such expressions of enthusiasm and worry
as exaggerated. But if moving closer to eighteenth-century experiences, it becomes clear that
dictionaries played a very different role in learning and culture during their ‘big break’, compared
to how we see and use them in the twenty-first century. 

26 September.
Pro Futura Scientia Day
By invitation only.

1 October, 10:15 a.m. SEMINAR - HYBRID EVENT
Ümit Kurt, Fellow, SCAS.
Assistant Professor, School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences, College of
Human and Social Futures, University of Newcastle
Biographies of Violence: Personhood, Agency and Mass Killing in the Late Ottoman Empire
Zoom Webinar: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/65802739142
ABSTRACT:
The systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire was planned and
executed by a cadre of individuals. Although in recent decades historians have explored the bio-
graphies of leading figures in the Committee of Union and Progress (the ruling party of the Otto-
man Empire during the First World War, hereafter CUP) and scrutinized their roles in the annihila-
tion of the Christian population of the Ottoman Empire, there is little systematic research on the
motivations of and interactions among those perpetrators. Furthermore, most participants in the
genocide on the local level are still unknown today. To address this gap in the literature, my seminar
will explore the lives and legacies of three genocide perpetrators at the provincial level. The life and
actions of three men provide us with insights that help better understand the dynamics of the politics
of persecution, the bureaucracy of genocide, the identity and mental world of the perpetrators under
CUP leadership, and the manifold facets of genocidal violence. In addition, whereas the mainstream
narrative of Turkish history emphasizes a rupture between the Ottoman Empire and the new republic, 
a careful analysis of the life stories, careers and actions of these perpetrators reveals the intellectual,
ideological and other continuities between the CUP and the republican regime founded in 1923. 

8 October, 10:15 a.m. SEMINAR - HYBRID EVENT
Yoko Yamazaki, Human Past Senior Fellow, SCAS.
Researcher, Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies, Finnish, Dutch and German,
Stockholm University
Working and Eating Together – Uralic=Indo-European Contacts in the Bronze Age
Working Communities
Zoom Webinar: TBC
ABSTRACT:

15 October, 10:15 a.m. SEMINAR - HYBRID EVENT
Daniel Lee, Fellow, SCAS.
Reader in Modern History, School of History, Queen Mary University of London
Writing the Story of One Roundup of Jews in the Holocaust: Marseille, January 1943
Zoom Webinar: TBC
ABSTRACT: -


17 October. BOOK RELEASE
LAMP Book Release
More information will follow.


22 October, 10:15 a.m. SEMINAR - HYBRID EVENT
Karolina Watroba, Fellow, SCAS.
Honorary Research Fellow, University of Oxford
World Literature in Weimar Germany
Zoom Webinar: TBC
ABSTRACT:

5 November, 10:15 a.m. SEMINAR - HYBRID EVENT
Mathias Thaler, Fellow, SCAS.
Chair of Political Theory, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh
Repetition in Action: The Problem of Human Agency in the Anthropocene
Zoom Webinar: TBC
ABSTRACT:

12 November, 10:15 a.m. SEMINAR - HYBRID EVENT
Seyram Avle, Global Horizons Senior Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Future Worlds: Chinese Techno Power and African Imaginaries
Zoom Webinar: TBC
ABSTRACT:

19 November, 10:15 a.m. SEMINAR - HYBRID EVENT
Vito Laterza, SCAS-Nordic Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of Development Studies, Department of Global Development and
Planning, University of Agder
Becoming Double: Digital Humanity, Surveillance Capitalism and the Cambridge
Analytica Data Scandal
Zoom Webinar: TBC
ABSTRACT:

26 November, 10:15 a.m. SEMINAR - HYBRID EVENT
Kateryna Bondar, SCAS-VUIAS Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor, Practical Psychology Department, Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical
University
Digital Citizenship Dynamics: Exploring Ukrainian Youth Perspectives Amidst the
Russian Military Invasion
Zoom Webinar: TBC
ABSTRACT:

3 December, 10:15 a.m. SEMINAR - HYBRID EVENT
Elizabeth Hull, Fellow, SCAS.
Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Chair of the Food Studies Centre, SOAS University
of London
Beyond Crisis: Navigating Volatility in South Africa’s Informal Food Sector
Zoom Webinar: TBC
ABSTRACT: