"It is no easy matter [...] to arrange the several varieties of work into 'orders', and to group the manifold species of arts under few comprehensive genera, so that the mind may grasp the whole at one effort - it is a task of most perplexing character", wrote Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London poor (1849-1851). Mayhew's early social research in London is well known - but far less so that he lived in Paris at the end of the 1830s, when the new medium of illustrated journals and collective publications experienced its heyday there, bringing together images and texts, artistic-literary and scientific circles in a new, creative way.
Back in London, Mayhew also worked between popular journalism and social statistics, consciously drawing on pictorial representations of social types for the latter, with which he fundamentally helped to shape ideas of the social.
We look forward to receiving abstracts (max. 400 words, in pdf format) with proposals for approx. 25-minute presentations together with a short CV by 2 May 2025 to adriana.markantonatos@uni-jena.de. The presentations will be in English, the discussions bilingual English / German. The workshop will take place in Erfurt. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered by the organisers
Programm
Thursday 20 November
13:15–13:45 Welcome & Introduction
Bernhard Kleeberg (Erfurt), Adriana Markantonatos (Jena), Jasmin Köhler (Jena)
13:45–15:00 Session I
Chair: Adriana Markantonatos (Jena)
Tobias Schlechtriemen (Freiburg)
Social Figures as Articulations of the Social: Between Literature, the Public, and Sociology
Kathrin Yacavone (Marburg)
Types and Series: On the Photographic Construction of Writers as Public Figures
15:00–15:30 Coffee Break
15:30–17:30 Session II
Chair: Bernhard Kleeberg (Erfurt)
Hannah Goetze (Paris)
L’Éducation sociale ? Learning to Read as Political Instruction in the mid-1800s in France
Jessica Resvick (Oberlin)
Character and Type in the Realist Novel
Kevin Kempke (Stuttgart)
Literary Model Cases – Social Figures in the Works of Siegfried Kracauer and Early 20th-century Sociography
17:30–17:45 Coffee Break
17:45–19:00 Session III
Chair: Maxim Braun (Jena)
Sarah Goeth (Aachen)
Common Sense and Observance: Statistical Narration of the Social in the 19th Century
Christoph Streb (Paris)
From Infrastructure Networks to Social Networks: Complicating the Relationship between Technological and Social Images in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
19:30 Dinner
Friday 21 November
9:00–10:15 Session IV
Chair: John Norrman (Jena)
Dirk Schuck (Erfurt)
Early Social-Scientific Reflections on Servant Girls and Fashion Objects
Miray Eroglu (Philadelphia)
Affairs of the Heart: Representations of Foreigners in Late-Ottoman Exotica
10:15–10:45 Coffee Break
10:45–12:45 Session V
Chair: Jasmin Köhler (Jena)
Annelie Ramsbrock (Greifswald)
The Addict: On the Social Cartography of a Global Figure in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Ya’ara Gil-Glazer (Tel-Hai)
Reframing the Erotic: Art Nouveau and the Shaping of Sexual Typologies in Suck Magazine
Manuel Bolz (Göttingen)
Urban Crisis Figures in the Entertainment History of Hamburg St. Pauli after the Second World War – Ethnographic Perspectives
12:45–13:15 Final Discussion