About

Since its foundation in 2002, the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH) has emerged as the leading international association for research and teaching in world and global history. Following seven successful congresses in Leipzig, Dresden, London, Paris, Budapest, Turku, and The Hague, the next ENIUGH congress will be held at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden. The congress will be on site only, although panel chairs may in exceptional cases allow participants to present their papers remotely.

Under the overall theme of “Critical Global Histories” we aim to further discussion, self-reflection, and the exploration of new avenues in global history. Over the past decade, global history has expanded internally (quantitatively and thematically, as well as methodologically and theoretically) and has, in doing so, influenced many other fields of research in the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, the expansion has led to debate and criticism, not least within the field. Objections have been raised against global history’s alleged macro-historical emphasis, connectivity bias, Eurocentrism, Anglophone dominance, and lack of attention to gender perspectives and Indigenous methodologies. Global history has also been accused of being imbued with neo-imperial, teleological, globalizing, exoticizing and neoliberal leanings. In recent years, decoloniality as a research practice and method has raised further questions regarding the situatedness of knowledge and the role of local sources for global history. At the same time, a current nationalist backlash in many countries has led to calls for a return to national history, thereby challenging the fundamental premises of global history.

At the Eighth ENIUGH Congress, we aim to pick up on these discussions and take a step forward by opening a space of dialogue, both between global historians and between global historians and their colleagues in other disciplines who are involved in the study of the global human pasts or who work with transnational, transregional, transcultural approaches in their respective fields. The Eighth ENIUGH-Congress will be a meeting place for scholars from all of the fields that go beyond methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism. We believe that critical thinking – both in the sense of impartial and intellectually disciplined thinking and in the sense of an augmented awareness of the many pitfalls associated with global history – can provide some of the means by which the field can evolve and retain its intellectual vigour and contemporary relevance. By framing the theme in terms of “global histories” in the plural, we aim to promote the inclusion of a broad range of voices, perspectives and orientations within the field, while forcefully rejecting the possibility of insisting on a single, dominating story or grand narrative of global history. The overall theme of the congress will be explored in a series of keynote events, roundtables, and panel discussions and in several of the regular panels and presentations at the congress.

Aside from the events related to the overall theme of the congress, we expect the congress to reflect the entire span of current research in global history, and we look forward to welcoming to Växjö scholars from all over world working on global and world history and related fields of study. Proposals can include a wide range of topics related to global, entangled, and transnational historical processes and phenomena, with no geographic or chronological limitations. While we expect most of the congress delegates to be historians, we also welcome scholars from other disciplines engaged in the study of humanity’s global pasts.

Panels and presented at the congress tackle one or more of the following themes:

• Temporalities and periodizations in global history
• Ethical aspects of doing global history
• Expanding the global archive
• Multivocality in global history
• Global history and decoloniality
• Transdisciplinary approaches
• Indigenous perspectives and methodologies
• Challenging modernity from the perspective of global history
• National history, nationalist backlash, and identity politics
• Global environmental history
• Nordic colonialism

Kind regards from the Organizing Committee,

• Stefan Amirell
• Marie Bennedahl
• Niladri Chatterjee
• Hans Hägerdal
• Janne Lahti
• Marten Manse
• Eleonor Marcussen
• Eleonora Poggio
• Birgit Tremml-Werner
• Katja Castryck Naumann
• Katrin Köster
• Steph Kite
• Christoph Gümmer