Since July 2019, historians from Sheffield, Utrecht, Stockholm and Oldenburg have been working together in the HERA "Intoxicating Spaces" project to investigate how tea, sugar and cocoa affected harbour and trading cities in the early…

Actor Jan Reinartz read some of the very special letters as part of the Göttinger Literaturherbst on 30 October in the Old Town Hall. You can find a video recording of the event here.

Can an entire society be controlled with the help of cybernetics and prognostics? What did the brave new world of Soviet futurologists' communism look like? And was there any criticism of the seemingly limitless progress?

How are ideas of social order projected onto landscapes, and how are they to be realised through the material design of space?

Using the example of the Soviet "invention" of the birch tradition, the project examines the process of change in Russian national self-concepts and their visualisations in the post-war Soviet Union.

Why are border areas and diasporas more susceptible to nationalisation practices? And what consequences does this have for a multi-ethnic empire?

The research project is dedicated to the biographies of senior civil servants in the Tsarist administration in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

Intoxicants arrived in Europe as "new intoxicants" in the course of early modern globalisation. They provoked controversy, changed socialising practices and created new spaces for consumption.