This seminar deals with the colonial entanglements of natural history collections in Switzerland. Through a combination of theoretical text reading and visits to selected collections, students develop a critical awareness of natural history collection practices, both from a historical and contemporary perspective.

The seminar offers a critical, globally historically informed examination of jazz history in Switzerland and at the same time opens up a completely new approach to important topics of recent cultural, social and gender history.

This block seminar examines current and historical debates in provenance research, with a particular focus on collections shaped by colonial contexts and by Nazi persecution. Using Swiss case studies as a point of departure, the seminar explores how questions of provenance, restitution, and remembrance emerge in museums and scientific institutions.

Between about 1800 and 1945 the Netherlands was a small country with a huge empire in what is now Indonesia and the Caribbean. In order to conquer and explore this empire, the Dutch depended also on the help of German-speaking scientists. How did German-speaking science and Dutch imperialism mutually benefit from each other? What consequences did it have for whom?