Date: July 21, 2025 to July 23, 2025
Location: Berlin, Freie Universität, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute's research area of global history

Periodization and Time in History: The Global View
How we divide up time through historical periodization and narrative is a profoundly political and often hotly contested knowledge practice: From eras and epochs, to revolutionary ‘turning points’ and civilizational decline and fall, historical imagination has been and still is a primary political arena. This becomes especially clear when global perspectives are taken into account. After all, a vast range of works on colonialism and orientalism, not to mention anticolonial and nationalist historiographies, have revealed the many ways in which modern history-writing around the world has projected, adapted or abandoned European historiography and shaped the past with an eye toward a multitude of political futures. Did these historiographies see civilizations as competing, progressing, or even accelerating – or were they rather perceived as being in stasis, or even decline? When did civilization even begin, and prehistory end? And when did prehistory end and geological deep time begin? Answers to these questions depended very much on where on the map one looked.

For these reasons, global historians have critiqued the Eurocentric bias that still seems to structure much historical writing, questioning for example the applicability of categories such as the Middle Ages or the Renaissance beyond European contexts. How, then, do we take stock of the simultaneity of global histories and the asynchronicity of historical periods globally? And how did scholars do so in the past?

To tackle these questions, the workshop “Periodization and Time in History: The Global View” will bring together the various strands of research and approaches that historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have developed on periodization and other instruments of historical writing in recent years. We welcome researchers working on any historical period or geography, on all types of historical knowledge – including histories of the natural sciences – and scholars at all career stages for the three-day event at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut of the Freie Universität Berlin from July 21 to July 23, 2025. We welcome contributions on, but not limited to, the following themes: ‘Periodization and Colonialism’, ‘Between Global Time and European Time’, ‘Gender and Periodization’, ‘Space and Periodization’, ‘Periodization between the Sciences and Humanities’, ‘Turning Points in Global History’, and ‘Beyond Periodization?’

The workshop is envisaged as a first step towards a publication in the ‘Time and Periodization’ series with De Gruyter (https://www.degruyter.com/serial/tph-b/html?lang=en#overview)

Applications are welcome for both three-person panels or individual submissions. If you are interested in participating, please submit a CV and 300-word abstract (500 words for panels) to periodizationtime@gmail.com before 28 February 2025.

Please also indicate in your communication whether you are or are not able to fund your own participation. The organizers have a limited budget to support participants who are otherwise unable to fund themselves.

For further information, please feel free to contact the organizers: Marcus Colla (University of Bergen), Anna Gutgarts (University of Haifa), Anna Simon-Stickley (Freie Universität Berlin), Oded Steinberg (Hebrew University of Jerusalem).