13312
Seminar
Language in Global History. The unifying, the alienating and the incomprehensible
Leonie Wolters
Comments
The seminar tackles language as a battleground of global history, both in our methodology as well as for historical actors. The dominance of English in scholarship reproduce colonial blinders, restricting access to sources, voices, and secondary literatures, while digital trends quietly entrench these inequalities. The seminar combines a critical history of English with a consideration of global histories of languages such as Sanskrit, Persian and Esperanto. We approach language history as information history, where integration is accompanied by massive data loss, and coercive intellectual structures are made malleable through appropriation and invention.
The seminar investigates linguistic practices such as lingua franca and pidgin, dialects and sociolects, literacy and orality, translation and word borrowing as both companions to and sites of resistance to imperial dominance and the homogenising and standardising processes of nation-building. We will also engage with historical critiques of the persistence of colonial languages into the postcolonial period from intellectuals who thought true independence could not come in French or English, and ask why they persisted nevertheless.
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The seminar investigates linguistic practices such as lingua franca and pidgin, dialects and sociolects, literacy and orality, translation and word borrowing as both companions to and sites of resistance to imperial dominance and the homogenising and standardising processes of nation-building. We will also engage with historical critiques of the persistence of colonial languages into the postcolonial period from intellectuals who thought true independence could not come in French or English, and ask why they persisted nevertheless.
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16 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Fri, 2026-10-16 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2026-10-23 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2026-10-30 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2026-11-06 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2026-11-13 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2026-11-20 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2026-11-27 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2026-12-04 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2026-12-11 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2026-12-18 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2027-01-08 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2027-01-15 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2027-01-22 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2027-01-29 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2027-02-05 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2027-02-12 10:00 - 12:00