As part of the Ambizione project, the PI has organized a series of groundbreaking international conferences in Bern and Harvard (as John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard and Fellow at the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformation). These conferences included a reflection on the importance of material substitution in modern industrial economies: “Resources and their substitutes: natural surrogates and synthetic competitors in world history” (Harvard, June 2022).
→ Conference programme
Another conference (in Switzerland in late June 2022, co-organized with Christof Dejung) addressed the theme “The Temporalities of Capitalism: Time, Timing and the Formation of the World Economy”. It explored the significance of temporal regimes for the breakthrough of capitalism globally. By linking the history of temporality, which has become a vibrant research field in the last few years, to the history of capitalism, this international event analyzed how economic history in general, and the history of capitalism in particular, cannot be understood without investigating the cultural processes that accompanied, and often made possible, the implementation of specific economic structures.
→ Conference flyer
A further international event, organized in June 2023, discussed issues of resource extraction and competing claims to sovereignty: “Natural Resources, Sovereignty and Markets: Revisiting Socio-Economic Histories of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”.
→ About the conference
The last conference in the series explored the history of exploding human consumption of natural resources and the origins of the Great Acceleration: “Extraction, Sovereignty and Resources in the Long Great Acceleration: Writing Global Economic and Environmental Histories, 1800-2000” (Bern, August 2023).
→ Conference programme
An upcoming conference will explore the ambivalent global histories of resource, political and geographical frontiers: “Frontiers in Global History: Connections and Disconnections” (Bern, November 2023).
→ Conference programme
In addition, findings from the various research projects have been presented at numerous international events, often by invitation. These included presentations in Bern, Berlin, Paris, Geneva and Harvard, as well as several online events.