BGHS.NEWS

Interdisciplinary Dialogue: More than Words - Language, Culture, and Academia

On Wednesday, 11 June 2025 at 6:00 pm, the BGHS will host the 8th Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Entitled "More than Words - Language, Culture, and Academia", the dialogue will focus on the relationship between language and culture in different academic contexts. The event will take place in room X-B2-103. The discussants are:

Sandra H. Lustig is a translator of academic texts, among others, and most recently translated the book "Enduring Enmity. The Story of Otto Kirchheimer and Carl Schmitt" by Hubertus Buchstein (2024). For this book, she also compiled an English glossary of words that were charged with special meaning in Germany during National Socialism, such as "space" or "healthy". With this translation work, she is helping to open up subtle cultural contexts of the language of National Socialism for today's English-speaking readers. 

Ingrid Piller is a linguist at the University of Hamburg and has just been awarded a Humboldt Professorship. Her research focusses on the relationship between language and social participation. She was previously a professor at Macquarie University in Australia and, together with colleagues, published the book "Life in a New Language" (2024), which sheds light on the lived experience of acquiring a new language.

Lisa Regazzoni is Professor of Historical Theory at Bielefeld University. She is intensively involved with the relationship between history and things, for example based on Reinhart Koselleck's collection of figures. In her new project "Towards a Material-Oriented Theory of History", funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, one of her aims is to develop a common language for the humanities and natural sciences in which the emergence of historical phenomena can be addressed and historical theory can be rethought. 

At the Interdisciplinary Dialogue, the invited experts will discuss with each other, but above all with the audience. Sabine Schäfer, Executive Manager of the BGHS, will moderate the dialogue. The event takes place in English. Following the Dialogue, the BGHS cordially invites you to a reception in the BGHS Lounge.