Theme description HIS114

Coordinator: Stephan Sander-Faes

In this course we will look at movable type print technology and culture, covering events and developments from around 1450 until the late 19^th century (the typewriter was invented in the 1870s). This course, in other words, covers established scholarship and recent directions of one of Europe’s unique accomplishments and its impacts across culture, politics, science, and society at-large.

We will take a close look at the technological evolution of printing and its output (books, broadsheets, leaflets, etc.) and how this key innovation changed the course of history by establishing Europe as ‘the continent of the printed book’. Emphasis rests key innovations, the dissemination of printed materials, their importance for the Scientific Revolution of the 17^th century, and the eventual emergence of what Jürgen Habermas called the Public Sphere. We shall look at both the history and the historiography of these events and developments of the past 200 years of scholarship, and the most recent 3-4 decades of research after the end of the Cold War.

Further particulars, frequent updates, and much more available via Mitt UiB.

Aims of this course:

• Gaining an overview of the most important events, developments, and scholarly positions from multiple (transnational) perspectives
• Reflections on the continuities and discontinuities involved, as well as their implications for periodisation schemes of mainstream scholarship
• Particular attention will be paid to the scholarly discussions of the topics covered, with a specific focus on post-1989 scholarship
• Gaining of an understanding of key terms and concepts, as well as the theoretical underpinnings that inform this or that research position
• Gaining in-depth understanding of how to include and combine scholarly positions in one’s own research and writing processes

Coordinator: Sarah Hamilton

This course explores the complex connections between human societies across time and space, and the ways in which those connections have served as the engine of human history over the past eight hundred years. Rather than exploring regional or national histories in isolation, we will think about the ways in which events, trends, and individual decisions in one part of the world can have dramatic, unforeseeable impacts on distant people and places. As a result of this approach, we will look at history as a series of interrelated stories that involve the interactions and mutual transformations of multiple cultures. Readings and lectures will explore these themes through a wide-ranging narrative encompassing, among other topics, the Pax Mongolica, the premodern Muslim world, indigenous networks in the Americas, Indian Ocean trade, forced migration in the Pacific, resistance and rebellion in the Black Atlantic, gender and labor in western Africa, and the Boxer Rebellion.