Research Themes
The consortium will include faculty and research teams that are specifically poised to address the key questions in the study of the global history of empires: the historical dynamics of imperial transformations and post-imperial political and cultural orders, the global entanglements between imperial formations, the role of peripheral, emulative, and rival imperialisms in the global dynamics of empire, and de-colonization in early modern and modern history.
With the help of a broad range of new methodologies for studying empires, such as the connected history or the post-colonial studies, the PhD programme fosters research with a focus on:
- the global dimension, conceived as a way to go beyond national histories and uncover the entanglements between spaces, regions, and rival universalisms;
- the early modern and modern historical dynamics of imperial expansion, decline, transformations and de-colonization;
- the beyond-Europe perspective and a revision of the taxonomy based on the First World and the Third World with the help of perspectives from peripheral and rival universalisms;
- a cross-disciplinary research interacting with the humanities, the social sciences and the history of science and knowledge production.
Thematic focus will include intellectual construction of empires, subjecthood and citizenship in imperial and post-colonial settings, gender, trajectories of transition from empire to post-imperial orders, European studies and the perspective on Europe from outside, history of migrations and diaspora, legal pluralism in comparative perspective.