Description:

Speaker

Dagmar Schäfer - History, Max Planck Institute

Title

"Rich Times: Global History, Technology and Yuan Silks"

Abstract

In this lecture, Professor Schäfer explores the possibilities of rethinking time—one of the core concerns of historical research—through the study of Yuan dynasty artifacts, both excavated from tombs and preserved in museum collections. Over the past decades, scholarship has increasingly recognized the temporal complexity of historical moments, emphasizing the coexistence of multiple temporalities that shape both past and present. This invites reflection on how historians inquire into and narrate time within distinct chronologies and how global history has developed through synchronous comparisons across cultures.

Moving beyond such synchronic approaches, she introduces an asynchronous comparative method—one that takes a similar technical phenomenon as its starting point rather than a fixed moment in time. Through a case study of silk reeling in early fourteenth-century Yuan China and Renaissance Italy around the turn of the sixteenth century, she demonstrates how looking across time rather than within a shared chronology can yield new insights into technological change and global connections. This approach is not only a way to decolonize time in history — and to restore the theft of history bemoaned by an earlier generation of anthropologists and historians. It a fresh perspective on both historical and contemporary understandings of innovation, adaptation, and exchange in a global context.

Biography

Honorary Professor in History of Technology at Technische Universität Berlin, and Associate Professor at the Institute of Sinology, Freie Universität, Berlin. She received her doctorate and habilitation from the University of Würzburg and has worked and studied at Zhejiang University, Peking University, National Tsing Hua University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Manchester, among others. She was previously a Guest Professor at Tianjin University and at the School of History and Culture of Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.