Traces. Public History and Heritage Studies – serie

Many people around the world ask themselves: what is in fact this "public history". All those who work at the junction of historical research and the history-related public outreach or public policy in museums, at memorial sites, in editorial offices, administrations, schools and universities must find themselves asking this question, as it concerns both their daily professional practice and their history-related freelance activities.What connects all these people around the world who –– although they work in different institutional settings –– experience their work as essentially common, and describe their professions as a part of a larger field of public history?There are countless answers to this question, yet they often converge on a simple common descriptive level which strives to address as many different practices as possible. In recent years, however, an attempt has been made to explain the nature of public history in a way that would provide an operationalizable definition of the concept.This volume presents a continuation of this debate with contributions from Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, Austria, Russia, the USA and Venezuela. By opening a space for a constructive, explicit and reciprocal discourse, this volume also renders public history visible in its form as a dynamic, theoretical scholarly practice.

Colonial capital and imperialism have shaped and redefined built environments in both metropole and periphery. Apparitions of trans-Atlantic colonialism and neo-colonialism haunt those societies and bound an important field of ideological and political contest, repudiation and resistance. Most of those actions have targeted commemorative monuments, object collections, and museum interpretation. Below and beyond those blatant ideological examples of imperialism, however, are the landscapes and structures that reinforce a habitus of imperial life, inferring rather than explicitly declaring its hegemony. This collection of historical archaeological studies, centered in the long nineteenth century, examines and reinterprets a series of architectural remnants – structures and landscapes – that continue to ideologically reinforce neo-colonial social and power asymmetries. Examples include the failing Spanish mission and colony in New Spain; the bombastic reconstruction of imperial Paris; the nascent imperium centered in an expanding New York City; the failed cooperative utopia of the Oneida religious community; and the wide-area effects of early industrialization in New England.

Contemporary handwoven textiles are the product of interconnected design processes, cultural influences, and economic contexts. Centering weaver creativity as a pluriversal lens, this book explores the external forces that drive change in contemporary Indigenous handwoven design. In collaboration with weavers from the village of Waraniéné, Côte d’Ivoire this study challenges conventional interpretations of commercial cloth woven between 1970 and 2023, highlighting the diverse knowledges, creative improvisations, and contexts that can be utilised to understand the diachronic changes in aesthetic pattern. Three concepts—haptic, rhapsodic, and gestural—form the basis of a critical practice developed specifically for this study called motif mapping. By systematically documenting the motif design process, motif mapping sheds light on the dynamic nature of textile design shaped by the improvisation of aesthetic forms and exchange of knowledge among weavers. Acknowledging the intricate interplay between local handwoven industries and global market dynamics, this book provides a platform to explore the challenges encountered by Indigenous craftspeople as they navigate their creative practices within the global marketplace.

At the intersection of art history, anthropology, and material studies, Echoes, Ripples, Wake: Casting Art and Flesh offers a critical reappraisal of plaster casts. Long dismissed as secondary objects—mere copies, tools, or pedagogical aids—casts are approached here as polymorphous, polysemic artefacts whose meanings shift across time, space, and context. Through a wide range of international case studies, from the Renaissance to the digital age, the volume interrogates replication, authenticity, canon formation, and the circulation of forms and images.Contributors examine casts made from artworks, architecture, and human bodies, revealing them as sites of contact between art and science, memory and violence, creation and appropriation. Particular attention is paid to colonial and racialized casting practices, as well as to the afterlives of casts in museums, archives, and contemporary restitution debates. Conceiving casts as a series of echoes and ripples radiating from an initial act of contact, the book proposes a renewed theoretical framework for understanding casts not as subordinate to originals, but as generative objects that actively shape knowledge, heritage, and cultural imaginaries.