Dr. Susan Baumert

The wealth of the cultural-historical spectrum already impressed me as a student. Above all, the wide thematic base of cultural history and its effective connectivity to other university subjects inspire and influence me to this day. The fact that this discipline does not focus on political historiography, but rather on man in his cultural having-become, and investigates his cultural techniques in the context of historical change, opens up many different facets.

In my dissertation, which deals with the genesis of bourgeois family festivals in Jena and Weimar around 1800, the cultural-historical field of the festive cultures becomes manifest, exploring man in his time-bound and symbolic activities. These phenomena draw attention to the superordinate dimension of time-bound cultures, which, in addition to memory and remembrance theories, also thematise practical branches such as ritual techniques and material cultures. I am especially fascinated in cultural history by the combination of these areas with the fields of visual anthropology and emotion research, whose source-based access to own testimony, such as diaries, letters, autobiographies or photographs, offers a crucial and illuminating approach to everyday life. Finally, travel and tourism research, with its diverse shapes and forms and spectrum of subjects, is a central part of my preoccupation, since it not only entails the exploration of the traveller within his time-bound historical context and motivation horizon, but also that of his contact with foreign cultures.