VG 3.101
18. Dec. (Monday), 16:15-17:45

Abstract:
At the turn of the twentieth century, radical utopian communities were built all around the world. They served as retreats, but they simultaneously constituted hubs for activists, reformers, and revolutionaries to meet, share, and develop new ideas and practices of community and human existence. The project Radical Utopian Communities deliberately builds on different and seemingly unrelated case studies of communal experiments, encompassing the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, the Nōson Seinen Sha’s anarchist commune in imperial Japan, and the Rastafarian Pinnacle Commune on Jamaica. In this talk, the main focus is on these communities’ intellectual work, and their staging as a struggle of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century.

Speaker:
Robert Kramm holds a doctoral degree in history from ETH Zurich and is currently Freigeist-Fellow and principal investigator of the research group “Radical Utopian Communities” in the School of History at LMU Munich. He received an Asia-Pacific History Fellowship at the GHI West at UC Berkeley, and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and the Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg at the University of Konstanz. His first book, Sanitized Sex: Regulating Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Intimacy during the Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952, was published 2017 with University of California Press. His peer-reviewed articles appeared in the Journal of World History, Journal of Women’s History, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Modern Asian Studies and Journal of Global History.

Organizer:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen