BGHS.NEWS

How did it actually come about that scientific theories about ‘races’ developed that legitimise everyday racism to this day? Malin Wilckens explores this question in the public lecture series Linie 4, organised by the BGHS together with the vhs Bielefeld. In her lecture "Scientific Racism and Comparative Anatomy - How the 'Collecting' of Skulls Led to the Theory of 'Races'", she accompanies a skull on its journey from grave robbery to the study of the professor of medicine Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) in Göttingen. The various stages of the skull's ‘journey’ reveal how closely scientific knowledge was intertwined with colonial and Enlightenment structures of the time and how certain claims to truth were produced.

Malin Wilckens studied history in Göttingen, Bielefeld and Essex and has been doing her PhD in history at the BGHS since 2018 on the topic of “Skull comparisons and the order of the world - racialisation processes in science”. She holds a doctoral scholarship of the German National Academic Foundation and herself travels a lot around the world. In 2019, she was a fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC and will spend a few months at Stanford University in California in 2022.

The lecture will take place on Monday, 06 December 2021 at 6.15 pm in the Murnau-Saal at the vhs Bielefeld, Ravensberger Park 1. The event will be held in German. The 2G rule applies.

Hier For more information on Linie 4 and the other lectures see here