PD Dr Nora Pleßke opens lecture series "The World of Things: Insights into Science, History, Theory and Practice“
As part of the project "One University, One Book", OVGU is organising a lecture series in the summer semester 2024 entitled "The World of Things: Insights into Science, History, Theory and Practice“, which PD Dr. Nora Pleßke will open on 18 April 2024 at 6 p.m. in the Senate Hall (Building 05, Room 205) with a lecture on "'The Great Victorian Collection' and the Translocation of Colonial Objects". In her habilitation thesis, Nora Pleßke investigated the transformative influence of products from colonial territories perceived as 'foreign', the appropriation of exotic objects and the commercialisation of colonial objects, and these epistemological changes will also be the focus of the lecture. Using the example of the Great Exhibition, the concept of translocation for postcolonial studies of material culture will first be introduced in order to then trace the complex processes of appropriation of colonial objects in new (everyday) networks of meaning. Other lectures will deal with computer and video games, post-digital materiality, object biographies, provenance research on property looted by the Nazis and cyclographic narratives.
The "One University, One Book" project is a nationwide competition organised by the Stifterverband and the Klaus Tschira Foundation, in which the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg was one of nine universities to win. University staff, students and interested book lovers read the book At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson together, discuss it and exchange views on questions and challenges of the present and future in order to find new ways of thinking. The book selection was the result of a voting process; Bryson's At Home was suggested by Marlene Adam, a former member of the University Collection Project initiated by the Magdeburg Anglophone Studies Department. Nora Pleßke's lecture will also be thematically linked to the University Collection project.