Global Processes Through the Lens of the Press

Conversation between two members of the cooperation project “Transregional Research”

In this podcast, Alix Winter (Forum Transregionale Studien) and Johanna Beamish (Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland) talk about their respective research projects and find out about various shared interests and points of references. At first sight, their projects seem quite different, as Alix worked on press debates on economic theories induced by the Continental Blockade, while Johanna analyzed newspapers written on intercontinental passages as documents of a global transit. However, they both approached their respective source material by formulating very similar questions: They read the documents with regard to the growing global interconnections and interactions in the nineteenth century and the intellectual appropriation of these processes by contemporaries. Talking about their respective results and challenges during their research, these two historians make a point for the usage of press material as historical documents when working with a transregional perspective.

The conversation was conducted in German.

Alix Winter is responsible for academic initiatives and events at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Before joining the Forum, she worked as project coordinator and translator for the Centre Marc Bloch. She studied History, Romance Studies and Political Sciences in Bielefeld, Freiburg i. Br., Paris and Potsdam. From 2010 to 2015 she wrote her PhD in the EU-funded Marie-Curie program “ENGLOBE – Enlightenment and Global History” at the universities of Versailles and Potsdam on discourses about world trade in the early nineteenth-century European press.

Johanna Beamish works at the Max Weber Stiftung – German Humanities Institutes abroad and is responsible for academic communication. She studied History and Romance Studies at the Universities of Heidelberg, the Universidad de Salamanca and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. From 2012 to 2016, she was a PhD student at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” based at Heidelberg University, where she worked on ship newspapers as documents of transit experiences.

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Citation: Johanna Beamish and Alix Winter: “Global Processes Through the Lens of the Press”, in TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 07.11.2017, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/8011.