Conferences, Workshops, Call for Papers

School libraries with historical book collections are barely anchored in the public consciousness. Yet in many places they contain cultural treasures of the highest order, which are also valuable sources for researching the history of education and knowledge. The conference aims to bring representatives from libraries, schools and academia into a dialog and focus on the past and present of historical school libraries. The aim is to network and consolidate cooperation.

The conference is a cooperation project between the Francke Foundations in Halle, the Institute of Educational Science at the Ruhr University Bochum and the DIPF Library for Research in the History of Education. The venue is the Francke Foundations, online participation is possible. 

Contact: grunewald(at)francke-halle.de; klosterberg(at)francke-halle.de

Go to the CFP at HSozKult

The public and international workshop will bring together experts and knowledge from various institutes in Germany, England and Borneo. Individual topics and questions about collection objects will be discussed with regard to their original meaning and use as well as their relevance to the history of Borneo's collections. The workshop is part of the project »Objects from Borneo in the Cabinet of Artefacts and Natural Curiosities of the Francke Foundations Halle« funded by the German Lost Art Foundation since December 2023. 

Please register with Giulia Speciale.

Contact: speciale(at)francke-halle.de

Accompanying the DFG project »Alchemy and Pietism. Alchemical Practice at the Halle Orphanage in the 18th Century«, which has been based at the Research Centre since April 2023, an interdisciplinary, public workshop will take place in March 2025. The focus will be on medical alchemy and associated early modern alchemical (knowledge) practices. The workshop aims to facilitate a professional exchange from the perspective of the history of knowledge as well as the history of pharmacy and chemistry.

Further information and the program can be found here.

Contact: weiss(at)francke-halle.de

On the first evening (November 13, 2024), the focus will be on herbal medicine knowledge that has been gained and exchanged in different contexts in the past and present. The cooperation project “Tri-Sustain”, which researches the pharmaceutical use of African plants, will be presented - it is an association of researchers from several sub-Saharan African countries and MLU Halle. This will be set in relation to practices of pharmacological knowledge production in missions of the 17th/18th century.

On the second evening (April 24, 2025), current results from pharmaceutical history research on alchemical practice at Halle's orphanage, today's Francke Foundations, will be presented. These will be introduced by an overview of laboratory distillation techniques since antiquity. A project will also be presented that makes an outstanding manuscript source of alchemical knowledge digitally available to researchers and the general public for the first time.

Further information and the program can be found here