Rhiannon Hein

My dissertation, "Göttingen's Global Modernity: Cultures of Belonging in a Provincial German Town, 1775-1815," charts Germans' time and placemaking practices in the Sattelzeit era. Using the small university town of Göttingen as a case study, I argue that Germans' efforts to map their belonging in a globalizing world became inextricably bound to their periodization of European modernity. Broad cross-class participation in scholastic and commercial imperial networks brought Chinese teas, Vanuatuan turtle shell bracelets, Indian muslins, and Egyptian bones to the town's doorstep, fostering a novel global consciousness of space that residents in turn ordered temporally. Time became the vocabulary and framework by which men and women defined their relationships to their concentric communities of Göttingen, the German lands, and Europe, as well as to the "Others" from whom they sought to distance themselves.

My research makes four important interventions. First, I disrupt normative characterizations of the German lands as a provincial backwater by demonstrating how residents used foreign goods, peoples, and ideas to stage key debates about identity and political power at the turn of the nineteenth century. Second, I weave together intellectual and material histories by tracing how elite academic ideas were manifested in and through the cultural worlds of civil servants, day laborers, and artisans, thus revealing the interdependence between ways of possessing and ways of knowing in the late Enlightenment and early Romantic eras. Third, I complicate the category of European modernity, often seen as marketing either the emergence of a new temporal consciousness or a new set of material conditions, by contending that this new time was a product of and force in Europeans' efforts to define themselves through their confrontation with the world. Fourth, my characterization of modernity as a narratological tool intended to address globalization offers a connective tissue between the early modern and modern eras, the historical distance between which has too often been perceived in terms of ruptures rather than continuities.