Activities of the graduate school

On May 16, 2025,the graduate school “History of Knowledge” went on an excursion to Jena to visit the Phyletisches Museum and the Ernst-Haeckel-Haus. The focus of the visit included questions regarding collection practices as well as the colonial and racist contexts of the museum’s collections.

At the Phyletisches Museum, Bernd Bock guided the group through the permanent exhibition, providing insights into the exhibition’s concept and the history of individual exhibits. Afterward, in the museum’s storage facility, the group was given insights into the preparation of specimens, the (dis)order of the objects, and their classifications. Dr. Ulrike Lötsch (Anatomical Collection of the University of Jena) further explored these insights using the history of Ernst Haeckel’s brain as a case study, highlighting how ideological dimensions have been intertwined with brain research since the early 20th century.

Afterward, the graduate school visited the Ernst-Haeckel-Haus, where Dr. Florence Vienne guided the group through the premises as well as the existing and planned exhibition areas. Here, the colonial and racist contexts of the objects were the focus of the discussion as well.

On 23 April 2020, the graduate school "History of Knowledge" went on an excursion to Göttingen. The excursion was centred around a visit to the Forum Wissen, which presents the university collections of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in a museum and research setting. The guided tours by Dr Christian Vogel focused on questions of knowledge: production, circulation and the (university) contexts in which knowledge is created. These questions were explored using objects, instruments and practices in order to discuss the diverse processes of knowledge production. This was followed by a visit to the memorial colloquium for the historian Rebekka Habermas, who died in December 2023. In this context, Bettina Brockmeyer (Giessen), taking up Rebekka Habermas' theses, spoke on the topic: "Indifferenz und Ignoranz statt Amnesie und Aphasie. Zum westdeutschen Umgang mit der Kolonialvergangenheit (1945-1989)".

In October 2022, the graduate school "History of Knowledge" met for the second one-day workshop on research question. The doctoral candidates and senior scholars of the graduate school discussed central questions of the individual dissertation projects. The event followed the successful first workshop on the topic of "What makes a strong research question?": The central task was to outline and precisely define this question, which enabled all ongoing dissertation projects to take centre stage.