Workshop: Germanic Collections in Britain, 10 November 2023

On 10th November, a workshop will be held highlighting Germanic collections in libraries in the UK—in part supported by the GSLG.

See below for more details, or visit the website for the workshop: https://tinyurl.com/mrrm343w

Venue:

UCL, Haldane Room (no registration required)

The workshop:

The relevance of libraries, archives and museum collections as varieties of institutional cultural capital (Bourdieu) has long been a feature of academic debate and historians have developed an impressive body of scholarship over the last decades. However, the history of German Studies collections in Britain and their role as agents of intercultural transfer between the two countries has received surprisingly little attention. Collections such as the manifold German holdings at the universities, archives, libraries and museums of London, Oxford, Cambridge and elsewhere brought together private, public, and military activity and arguably served as potent symbols, and sometimes naive pawns, of imperialist, intellectual and economic power. The conflicted and complex history of these collections thus also reflects the history of the shaping of Anglo-German academic, cultural, and political relations.

This workshop will seek not only to highlight the wealth of German (and ‘Germanic’) collections across the UK’s GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums), but also to advocate for their recognition as a distinct cultural category, where their value is currently too often subsumed into wider disciplines and concerns. Intellectually aggregated, we anticipate that these collections will provide a vivid portrait of Anglo-German relations across centuries and disciplines and illustrate the many ways in which our institutions have been involved in continental and global politics, both passively and actively.

This event is generously supported by Senate House Library, Centre for Anglo-German Relations (CAGCR), German Studies Library Group (GSLG), University of London, Victoria & Albert Museum, Lady Margaret Hall (Oxford).

For further questions, please contact german.collections.uk@gmail.com.