During the academic year 2013-2014, IISH colleagues Maral Jefroudi and Pim de Zwart spent a semester at the Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two were invited by the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (link is external) (WIGH), an institution that closely cooperates with the IISH. This collaboration aims at the development of a global network of research institutes. The WIGH intends to promote historiography from a non-Western perspective as a means of bringing about new scholarly insights.
The Weatherhead Initiative hosts selected PhD students and postdocs, and organizes seminars and conferences. Therefore, there are always scientists present from different corners of the world and from different (historical) disciplines, all with a common interest in global history.
Maral and Pim participated in seminars with different perspectives. Sometimes the papers presented focused more on cultural aspects, while at other times social, political or economic issues were more at the center. The seminar were ended with a dinner with the core group of global historians consisting of Professors Charles Maier and Sven Beckert, plus postdocs, visiting fellows and the guest speakers and commentators of the session that day. During the rest of the week, the discussions on the seminar paper would continue over lunch in the cafeteria of the Weatherhead Center.
Besides the Global History group, Harvard had a lot more to offer. Every day various seminars were scheduled that were open for the wider public. There were also larger events such as the Global EP Thompson Conference on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Thompson's pioneering book ‘The Making of the English Working Class’, lectures by Herbie Hancock on the ethics of jazz and a surprise visit by President Barack Obama.
In addition to his participation in the global history group, Pim de Zwart participated in seminars on economic history and in workshops organized by the Harvard Economics Department. He gave a presentation at the Weatherhead lunch seminar, and during the economic history seminar he discussed his paper Dynamics of Globalization in the Early Modern World. Furthermore, he got the chance to discuss his work during coffee and lunch breaks with, among others, Prof. James Robinson (economist and co-author of the bestseller Why Nations Fail).
Maral attended the workshop ‘the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism’, organized by Professors Sven Beckert and Christine Desan; she participated in the reading group History of Capitalism, where works of EP Thompson, Gramsci, Bourdieu and others were discussed and she participated in the - organized by the same people - thesis group where parts of ongoing dissertations were discussed. Maral presented her work “Reading 1951 The Nation Normalization Of Oil In Iran: Global Interactions, Continuity, and Change” in the ‘thesis club’ and during a lunch seminar organized by the Weatherhead Center.
