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The Institute for European Global Studies congratulates Prof. em. Dr. Madeleine Herren on her 70th birthday
Madeleine Herren, former Director of the Institute for European Global Studies and Professor emerita for Modern History, celebrates her 70th birthday. As director of the Institute from 2013 to 2023, she played a key role in sharpening its global, digital, and historical profile. Under her leadership, the Institute evolved into an internationally recognised hub for the study of Europe in its global context, fostering innovative collaborations between history, political science, law, and economics.
Madeleine Herren’s scholarly work has been central to rethinking Europe’s place in the world. Her pioneering research on international organisations, cross-border networks and global governance has helped to fundamentally reshape perspectives on the 19th and 20th centuries. By combining prosopographical, institutional and digital approaches, she has opened up new ways of studying archives, tracing transnational communities, and analysing the infrastructures of modern internationalism. Her projects on diplomatic and consular networks in Asia, international conferences, and international organizations have been widely noted for their methodological ambition and for their contribution to a truly global history of Europe.
International Conference with leading scholars in Global History on the 5th of February
In honour of her 70th birthday, the Institute for European Global Studies is hosting the international conference “Between Precarity and Persistence: Concepts, Methods, and Topics in Global History” on 5 February 2026. The event asks what global history can – and should – contribute in the coming years. How can historians rethink established approaches considering recurrent crises, contested global orders and the changing relationship between capital, governance, and mobility? What new perspectives emerge when capitalism, logistics and international organisations are understood as infrastructures of inequality as well as of connection? And how might new forms of (digital) data and methodological innovation transform the practice of global and transnational history?
The conference will open with a keynote lecture by Mary O’Sullivan (Geneva) on “Thinking in Chains: Revisiting the Emergence of Global Cotton Capitalism, 1784–1833”. Further talks by Roland Wenzlhuemer (Munich), Johannes Paulmann (Mainz), Isabella Löhr (Berlin) and Ines Prodöhl (Bergen) will explore new perspectives in global, economic and transnational history. The day will conclude with a round table featuring Susanna Burghartz (Basel), Amalia Ribi Forclaz (Geneva), Madeleine Herren (Basel) and Kerstin von Lingen (Vienna), followed in the evening by a greeting address from Thomas Staehelin (President, Stiftung Europainstitut Basel) and a tribute by Sacha Zala (Bern), as well as an Apéro Riche.
Participation in the conference is by invitation.