CSMC Newsletter

The past month was the first of 84 in the second phase of the new old UWA cluster. And a lot has already happened: our many new postdocs and doctoral researchers have had two intensive weeks in which they got to know their new working environment, received a thematic introduction to UWA research, and also presented their own work and plans for the coming years: as part of a well-attended flash talk marathon, during which the new research projects were presented in five minutes each, using 25 objects. At the recent retreat in Neumünster, the new Concepts and Methods Units (CMUs) and Project Groups (PGs) were formed. The Individual Research Projects (IRPs) have also started, many of which can now be found online. Feel free to check our website regularly over the next few weeks to read the new project descriptions, which will be published continuously.

The estates of German-Jewish intellectuals held at the National Library of Israel bear witness to the migration of people and archives in a turbulent era. The newly launched online exhibition ‘Between Hamburg and Jerusalem: Archival Excursions’ offers a rich and engaging way to explore some of the stories encapsulated in these estates: structured in six thematic chapters, it illuminates connections between Hamburg and Jerusalem, including figures such as Martin Buber and Max Grunwald. A distinctive feature is its use of chance: visitors can either follow the curated structure or enter the exhibition randomly, discovering unexpected connections and relations. Developed jointly by Sebastian Schirrmeister (CSMC) and Anna Menny (Institute for the History of the German Jews), the exhibition is freely accessible on the Key Documents of German‑Jewish History website.

The New German Theatre in Prague was one of the first venues to venture a new interpretation of Wagner's Parsifal. The opera house was the cultural centre of the German-speaking population and a prestigious building with a large orchestra and an excellent ensemble. The composer and conductor Alexander Zemlinsky was the principal conductor and music director for many years. He immediately put Wagner’s play on the programme once he had the opportunity to. The dissertation of Laura Maxine Kalbow, which was recently published by Königshausen & Neumann, assesses Zemlinsky’s Wagner interpretation in detail. The result reads ‘like a theatre thriller’, says an enthusiastic review on the radio show ‘Treffepunkt Klassik’ at SWR Kultur.

During the 14th and 15th centuries, German‑language texts increasingly addressed practices considered magical, offering detailed instructions for writing, drawing, and crafting objects used for divination, protection, harm, or communication with supernatural beings. These texts describe a wide range of materials and techniques, from inscribed metal plates and wax tablets to magic circles, amulets, and symbols in various languages or incomprehensible characters. Marco Heiles has catalogued and edited these instructional traditions to trace continuities and transformations in magical practices from the medieval to the early modern period. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has published an article on his UWA project on ‘Magical Written Artefacts in Late-Medieval German Instructional Literature’ in its printed issue on 28 January.

Over the past two decades, graffiti studies have flourished, driven by large-scale documentation projects and growing recognition of graffiti’s historical and cultural significance. The SMC volume Graffiti Scratched, Scrawled, Sprayed: Towards a Cross-Cultural Understanding brings together fourteen cross-cultural case studies from antiquity to the present, offering methodological and conceptual insights that serve both newcomers and specialists in the field. Recently, Pedro Soares Neves published a review on it in Epigraphy, Graffiti, Iconography, praising the volume as ‘a foundational text that consolidates and propels graffiti research across disciplines and cultures.’ The volume itself is available open access and can be downloaded from the publisher’s website.

Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), the famous English writer and politician, was also a collector of printed books and manuscripts. His personal library of some 3,000 volumes is housed and catalogued in the Pepys Building of Cambridge University, still arranged exactly as he left them. Among these volumes, manuscript PL 2820, known as Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrighty, tells a particularly interesting story. Originally meant to be a manual of shipbuilding by the renowned Tudor shipwright Mathew Baker (1530–1613), its contents and physical characteristics reveal a long and surprising history that ended when the manuscript found its final form and its place in the Pepys Library. What does this manuscript tell us about Early Modern shipbuilding, and its relationship with mathematics? And how does the materiality of the artefact reveal its different uses, including that of a mathematical tool? Stefano Farinella explores these questions in the latest episode of our Artefact of the Month series.