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.
19th Potsdam Postgraduate Forum on Contemporary History
"Everything Everywhere All at Once? Krisen in der Zeitgeschichte"
The 19th Potsdam Postgraduate Forum on Contemporary History will take place from 20 to 21 November 2025 at the ZZF in Potsdam. The ZZF doctoral candidates are looking forward to receiving abstracts for this year's conference "Everything Everywhere All at Once? Krisen in der Zeitgeschichte" by 4 July 2025 to doktorandenforum [at] zzf-potsdam [dot] de (doktorandenforum[at]zzf-potsdam[dot]de). You can find out more about the call for abstracts and the conference, including a link to the announcement on H-Soz-Kult, via this link.
Are we living in a world entangled in an unprecedented web of interconnected crises? This impression might stem from the numerous global challenges we face today. Such concerns are reflected in various analyses of our current times, with the concept of a "polycrisis" being one of the most prominent.1 The idea that different crises are becoming increasingly interdependent and mutually reinforcing has been discussed since the early 1990s.2 However, only recently has this notion gained prominence as a central theme in political discourse.3
At the 19th Doctoral Forum of the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF), we see the pervasive presence of crisis diagnoses as a valuable opportunity for PhD students to engage in meaningful discussions about crises in contemporary history and to explore the origins of the challenges facing our present.
Notes:
1 For example, the DFG and other renowned research institutions recently diagnosed that Germany is "in a polycrisis", see Alexander von Humboldt Foundation et al, Position zur Regierungsbildung. Wissenschaft und Innovation: Klare Ziele, mutiges Handeln, März 2025, https://www.dfg.de/resource/blob/353336/741f92853eb38a20de37b1fd61a5c8fd/250318-positionen-regierungsbildung-2025-data.pdf.
2 Edgar Morin/Anne-Brigitte Kern, Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium, New York 1999 (in the French original "Terre-Patrie", first published in 1993).
3 Cf. for example World Bank, Pathways out of the Polycrisis, Washington 2024; Michael Lawrence et al, Global polycrisis: the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement, in: Global Sustainability 7 (2024), pp. 1-16. The term was popularised as an analytical term by the economic historian Adam Tooze, see Adam Tooze, Chartbook 130: Defining polycrisis - from crisis pictures to the crisis matrix, 24 June 2022, https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-130-defining-polycrisis.