Mission Statement
The Munich Centre for Global History is the main platform to coordinate and facilitate research in global history in Munich and beyond. It is the principal concern of the centre to bring together research and teaching in the field beyond disciplinary boundaries, to support these endeavours and to make them widely visible and accessible. The Munich Centre for Global History understands global history as a particular research perspective that focuses on the significance of global connections and entanglements and examines the prerequisites, conditions and meanings of global exchange in human history. It is one of the centre's most important tasks to establish and maintain an interdisciplinary structure for the still comparatively little institutionalised field of global history. To this end, the Munich Centre for Global History brings together existing initiatives in the field. At the same time, it initiates, develops and implements new global history projects.
The centre has four main aims. First, it seeks to foster scientific exchange between the individual global history projects and to create synergies regarding their administration and organisation. In this context, the centre is the principal clearing house for research in global history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and the Munich higher learning environment. Second, the centre operates as an incubator for innovative research endeavours in global history. New initiatives can originate in the exchange between the different projects at the centre, in the international fellowship programme or in the centre's promotion of young researchers. Third, the centre wants to contribute to the discussion about the conceptual foundations of global history research. In the last decades, the field has quickly expanded its research agenda. It is now gradually entering a phase of consolidation that necessitates the re-evaluation of its research interest, its methods and theoretical approaches. The centre attaches great importance to contribute to this ongoing conceptual re-evaluation on the basis of profound empirical research. Fourth, the Munich Centre for Global History provides an important interface regarding the transfer of global history research results into teaching and public discourse.
The centre wields a broad spectrum of academic instruments. Besides its role as a platform and clearing house for global history research in Munich, its function as an incubator for new projects and host for an international fellowship programme, the centre offers additional activities for a broad audience. Every term, the centre organises an international lecture series in global history. Together with partner institutions, it bi-annually advertises the International Research Award in Global History. This prize allows promising scholars in the field to host an international symposium on a topic of their choice in Munich. Every year, the centre co-organises a transregional colloquium on global history together with the universities in Mannheim and Marburg. Furthermore, it hosts a master class in global history for the graduate and doctoral students in Munich. An important element of the centre is its so-called TransferLab which is concerned with the transfer of global history topics into the wider public.