Narrating World History after the Global Turn: The Cambridge World History (2015)

Abstract

With this issue we close the 29th year of a journal that owes its beginning to the special circumstances of the upheaval of 1989. Until autumn of this year, it was almost impossible to dream of founding an academic journal for Leipzig’s school of world history writing led by scholars like Walter Markov and Manfred Kossok, because real-socialism in its East German variant was characterized above all by inscrutable bureaucratic rules that concealed the desired control over thoughts and concepts. True, the leading histori-cal journal in the country, the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, was open not only to national history narratives and hosted also debates on the world historical importance of past events but this remained unsystematic and often heavily impacted by an orthodox understanding of Marxism-Leninism. The other review that could have become home for world history approaches, the journal “Asien-Afrika-Lateinamerika” founded in 1973 as successor to the Leipzig based yearbook of the same title, had developed into a place where contemporary issues and current political strategies of the GDR-government to-wards the so-called Third world dominated completely.

Biographical Note

Matthias Middell (SFB 1199 & Leipzig University, Germany)

Matthias Middell is a professor of cultural history at Leipzig University as well as a speaker of the SFB 1199 and director of the Global and European Studies Institute at Leipzig University. He studied history earning his PhD from Leipzig University with his research focusing on the French Revolution. Since 2013, he has served as the director of the Graduate School Global and Area Studies in Leipzig and is currently the head of the Erasmus Mundus Global Studies Consortium. He teaches regularly at partner universities and co-supervises PhD candidates with colleagues from France, South Africa, and Ethiopia. His current research interests include the history of the French Revolution from a global perspective, history of cultural transfers around the world, and the role of space in the understanding of the current world being the result of long-lasting global connections.

Katja Castryck-Naumann (GWZO Leipzig, Germany)

Katja Castryck- Naumann is a historian specializing in the history of international organizations, the history of world history writing, and the history of transnational entanglements of and in East Central Europe. Since 2008, she has been a senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe in Leipzig and teaches global history at the Global and European Studies Institute at Leipzig University. She is the editor for the electronic journal Connections. A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists and an editorial assistant for Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung as well as chairperson of the European Network in Universal and Global History.