The postgraduate forum is an annual scholarly conference on current topics in contemporary history offering external junior researchers the chance to present and discuss their dissertation projects at the ZZF. Doctoral candidates at the ZZF are in charge of planning and organizing the conferences.
20th Potsdam Postgraduate Forum on Contemporary History
»Finding the Right Size: Scales and Measures in Contemporary History«
In this year the Potsdam Postgraduate Forum on Contemporary History will take place from 20 to 21 November 2025 at the ZZF in Potsdam.
Organsation: Julian-Dakota Bock, Caroline Elfe, Lisa Thiel und Leon Waldmann
Call for Papers für das 20. Doktorand*innenforum zur Zeitgeschichte
(CfP in English via H-Soz-Kult)
Deadline for abstracts: July 31, 2026
Recent historiographical approaches have increasingly challenged established spatial and temporal scales of historical inquiry. Fields such as global history, environmental history, anthropocene studies, and deep history have expanded historical analysis beyond conventional geographical and archival limits. Digital humanities and digital history have recalibrated our engagement with historical sources. Questions of scale have thus become central to many of these methodological and theoretical debates in contemporary history.
The 20th Potsdam Doctoral Forum on Contemporary History takes up historiographical debates concerning standards and perspectives and uses the »methodological uncertainty« (Carlos Spoerhase), recently observable across the humanities with regard to the scales employed, as an opportunity to focus attention on the concrete practices of historical scaling in contemporary history research projects. At the center of the forum lies the question of how measures and scales are established, adopted, shifted, and reflected upon and what forms of historical insight such operations enable or foreclose.