- 2024 Spring: “BA Research Seminar: Art as a Means of Historical Inquiry” – UZH History Department, Cross-listed at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).
In this inter-university teaching collaboration between the University of Zurich (UZH) and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), we develop didactical tools for historians and artists to explore each other’s fields and inspire critical ways of engaging with the past. Over four semesters, UZH undergraduates collaborate with instructors and students from ZHdK as an inter-university team and develop the contents and strategies necessary to teach historical research as a creative and exploratory process. Unlike conventional uses of art as a source of information in historiography, we engage in artistic work as a cognitive process that helps identify tensions, voices and perspectives otherwise hidden by the archive.The materials created during the funding period will be made available on our prospective online platform. Teaching segments include mapping, storytelling, audience engagement, and non-textual communication around specific historical problems. The segments are implementable as semester-long curricula, or as individual teaching blocs in research design workshops. Built on a solid foundation of critical questioning, analytical writing and multivariant problem solution –– the bedrock of the humanities -– the projects we pursue shall stimulate scientific outreach, civil engagement, and creative problem solving beyond the humanities.
- 2024 Summer School: “Art as a Means of Historical Inquiry: The Living Environment of an Organic Farm” – UZH History Department and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). June 10–14, 2024, Hof Blum, Samstagern ZH (Switzerland).
This inter-university workshop brings together historians and artists to explore each other’s fields and inspire critical ways of engaging with the past. Developing and realizing small projects as interdisciplinary groups, historians collaborate with the program in Transdisciplinary Studies in the Arts at ZHdK. Inter-university teams identify and develop essential questions and strategies necessary to practice historical research as a creative and exploratory process. Our colleagues from ZHdK are instructors, graduate students and professional artists in a broad range of fields, including photography, visual arts, music, theater, production management, and curatorial studies. Familiarizing ourselves with the history of the living environment, we engage in artistic work as a cognitive process that helps identify tensions, voices and perspectives otherwise hidden by the archive.
- 2025 Spring: MA Methods Seminar “Experiences of Migration and Displacement: Art as a Means of Historical Inquiry” – History Department.
UZH Course Catalogue
Archival work leads historians to the boundaries of the knowable. This interdisciplinary class offers historians and artists the opportunity to collaborate and explore how the methodological interaction of their respective fields can inspire new ways to engage with fragments of the past. By revisiting traditional definitions of “archives,” we seek new possibilities to analyze historically conditioned aspects of the present. Focusing on modern histories of migration and displacement, we will explore different ways of observing, asking and analyzing. What is an archive? What interests and power relations have left their imprint on records of the past? How do we tell the story of those absent from the archive? How do our possibilities as artists and historians change as we explore new tools and media? These are the most central questions around which this class evolves.
We convene periodically with a class in the Program in Transdisciplinary Studies in the Arts at ZHdK to help students combine classical research tasks with the challenge of processing glimpses of the past into informed, critical and personal interactions through art. Semester portfolios consist of a documented artistic process and a reflection that positions this process in a context of historiographical problems. We encourage participants to bring in their own research topics and revisit their sources in collaboration with our ZHdK colleagues. Artistic contributions can include photographic essays, maps, drawings, performances, or interactive digital projects that help explore questions otherwise unasked. The symbiosis of art and humanities shall create a wider epistemic space and expand the historian’s toolset beyond the traditional limitations of our field.
