Featured posts
From the First Gay Kiss to “Woke Garbage” – the Department of Defense’s Censorship of Queerness in Film
by Laura Herges May 16, 1929, would go down in history as the birthday of the world’s most prestigious awards ceremony. Nearly 100 years ago, the first Academy Awards took place inside the Blossom Ballroom at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. 270 people had bought a ticket for 5$ (92$ adjusted…
Carl Schmitt’s Afterlife in Decolonial Theory: Rereading Walter Mignolo
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research By Harald Kümmerle Living with Schmitt’s Ghost To say that Carl Schmitt is a controversial figure would be an understatement. Called the “crown jurist of the Third Reich” for his proactive engagement with Nazi politics, he remains a key point of reference for the…
A New Tutorial to Level Up Your Research Data Skills
From an Excel table to a Wikidata entry in 10 minutes. Learn how to easily transform a spreadsheet into semantic data — with the help of OpenRefine.
Ruins and Visions of Empire: Famagusta and the Quest for Revival in the Late Nineteenth Century
‘Ruin’ was the primary term used by countless visitors to describe the Cypriot port town of Famagusta during the period of Ottoman rule (1571–1878), to the extent that the two terms became almost synonymous. A notable example is Namık Kemal (1840–88), the foremost Ottoman thinker and a critic of the…
Past, Present and Future of Socio-legal Epistemic Pluralism
Is interdisciplinary legal research in crisis because of its lack of theoretical unity? Or is its diversity its greatest strength? This post looks beyond the boundaries of our own discipline and argues that we need to understand our own history better in order to conduct better research in the future.[1]…
Announcing The History of Christian Kabbalah Podcast
The History of Christian Kabbalah Podcast explores the remarkable encounter between two religious traditions: the meeting of Jewish mysticism and Christian theology. From the Renaissance to the early Enlightenment, a wide range of Christian thinkers—humanists, theologians, visionaries, and scholars—turned to Kabbalah in search of hidden wisdom and deeper insight into…
Portrait F. Mendelssohn B. (engl.)
F. Goya (c. 1815–1828), attr., Portrait of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–1847), late work “graphic phase”, Bordeaux 1825, oil on canvas, dimensions 42 x 33 cm The canvas has been relined. Relining and varnishing/restoration can smooth the brushstrokes somewhat, soften the microrelief, and reduce the legibility of the lines, yet the…
Cognitive Dissonance in Stay-Leave Decisions of Ukrainian Forced Migrants
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research By Natalia Zaitseva The findings outlined in this text came as a surprise to me as a researcher. Since the beginning of the Russian war on Ukraine, I have been researching the motives for mobility/immobility among Ukrainian women during wartime. However, in the course…
Zsuzsa Török, Branding Emília. Editorial Partnership and Marital Collaboration in Családi Kör (1860–80)
This paper explores the editorial partnership between Emília Kánya (1828–1905), the first female editor in Hungary and the Habsburg Monarchy, and her husband, the writer, journalist, and teacher Mór Szegfi (1825–96). The paper positions the couple as influential figures whose collaboration shaped the development of women’s periodicals in the mid-to-late…
Dates, Dating, and Uncertainty
It’s a Curious Thing Dates for Exlibris ––– Some artists make it easy for us and add a date to the exlibris, and we can see it with our bare eyes. Normand Laheld is such an exlibris artist for whom we have dates for his exlibris and can be pretty…
Vietnamese “Boat People” – a history of displacement and rejection
By Anne Chmela, B.A. The Vietnam War and the “Boat People” Vietnam became the scene of a proxy war in the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union[1] after the withdrawal of French colonial forces from Southeast Asia, which divided the country into a communist North and a…
Interview with Dr Ivan Sablin
Dr Ivan Sablin is Interim Professor of Eastern European History of Heidelberg University and research fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana. He has published extensively on the history of parliamentarism in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, as well as on regionalism, nationalism, and state-building in…
Romantic Age scholars’ engagement with Sanskrit sources as revealed by a Latin catalogue of German Oriental manuscripts
By Gleb Sharygin As part of my work in the Qalamos project, I had to process the entries of the old Latin catalogue of South Asian manuscripts kept at the University of Bonn, written by Johann Gustav Gildemeister in the late 19th century. It took some effort, as my Latin…
Militarization as Conviviality: How Women Define and Resist Gendered Everyday Violence and Discipline in Brazil
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research By Izadora Xavier do Monte This article is a shortened version of the eponymous MECILA Working Paper, which was originally published by the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America in 2025 and can be read here. “Do you think reparation for what…
Recap and Lessons on Research Software Localization from February Talk
How does software written in one language come to be available in other languages? And how is this process, known as localization, different for research software? Those were key questions adressed by Christopher Hertweck’s talk delivered on February 24th, 2026 online. To begin, Christopher briefly introduced us to the use…
Global Bones – An introduction podcast
Have you ever thought about the significance of bones in art, history, religions or even politics? Have you ever wondered how their meanings and the media that display them evolve and why ? In...