In co-operation with the Modern History Research Seminar, University of Oxford
Today, the state of emergency seems to be as permanent as it is omnipresent. The term became ubiquitous in the early twentieth century and continues to guide the self-description of contemporary societies. Yet, referring to ‘emergencies’ implies a large range of meanings, from actual states of war to moments of humanitarian crisis, from abstract realms of the law to concrete territories under siege. The lecture argues for a history of emergency experiences in the long twentieth century that reaches beyond ‘classical theories’ and focuses on the social dimensions of administrative agency instead. It treats the ‘state of emergency’ as an imaginary that informs technocratic practices and legal theory at the same time, and argues that historicizing it can help us to understand the critical role of the state apparatus in moments of transformation.
Stefanie Middendorf is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and convenes the DFG Network ‘Doing Debt: Praxeology of Sovereign Debt in the Long Twentieth Century’. Her research interests centre on German and European history, especially on the social history of statehood and on cultural dimensions of modern economic life. Her most recent book, Macht der Ausnahme: Reichsfinanzministerium und Staatlichkeit (1919–1945), was published in 2022, and a collective volume on practices of sovereign debt is under contract with Campus Verlag for 2023.
This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to attend this event, please register via Eventbrite to take part in person or online.
5pm