On March 10, 2023, join the UBC History Global Premodern Research Cluster for “Meetings in the margins: Religious and Cultural Contact in Greenland and Sápmi Before 1550”, a presentation by Dr. Cordelia Heß (Nordic History, University of Greifswald).
The Global Premodern Research Cluster was established to bring together a multidisciplinary community with shared and varied interests in global premodern studies. It serves as a forum for faculty, sessional and limited-term instructors, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and interested undergraduate students affiliated across department at UBC as well as interested participants beyond UBC. The Global PreModern Research Cluster conceives of ‘premodern’ as global in its geographic breadth and flexibly ranging in its temporal scope from ancient times up to 1800 CE. The group embraces a plurality of perspectives to the past and the evidence used to study the past, including textual, material, oral, and visual sources.
The Cluster is convened by Drs. Sara Ann Knutson, John Christopoulos, and Shoufu Yin. To be added to the mailing list or for other queries, please contact Sara Ann Knutson at sa.knutson@ubc.ca.
The Herrnhuter missionary building in Nuuk, Greenland. Photo by Cordelia Heß.
Talk Abstract
Contact between Arctic and Fennoscandic peoples and Christian settlers and traders had occurred several centuries before missionaries became agents of European expansionism. Early contact between the different groups is nevertheless primarily and inevitably interpreted as the beginnings of colonial domination, and rarely as part of a political and religious strategy consciously adopted by Indigenous peoples and analogous to, for example, the Christianisation of Scandinavian kings or the Scandinavian elite. As a consequence of this, a form of preordained European dominance and superiority is often assumed – both in works informed by critical race theory and in traditional Scandinavian scholarship. In this project, the scarce written sources will be re-examined with a focus on pre-modern constructions of race in Northern Europe.
About the Presenter
Cordelia Heß. Photo by Till Junker, Universität Greifswald.
Cordelia Heß is professor of Nordic History at the University of Greifswald. She holds a doctorate in Medieval and Modern History from the University of Hamburg (2007) and a “docentur” from the University of Stockholm (2013). Her research interests cover the cultural and religious history of the Baltic Sea region, medieval hagiography, and antisemitism in a long-term historical perspective. Her latest publications are The Medieval Archive of Antisemitism in Scandinavia (2021) and Antisemitism in the North (with Jonathan Adams, 2020).
