The volume “Konstruktionen Europas in der frühen Neuzeit – Geographische und historische Imaginationen” features articles both in English and German and reflects the results of the conference “Rethinking Early Modern Europe in a Global Perspective”. The event was organized by the Chair for the Early Modern Period of the Department of History in September 2015 and supported by the Cluster "Asia and Europe".
Global history has long become an established field of research. At the 11th conference of the working group on the Early Modern Period in 2015, participants aimed at applying global-history approaches not only on distant world regions, but especially on early modern Europe. “Europe” has consistently been both a subject to and a concept of negotiation processes, which hardly kept to territorial borders or clear-cut topographically or language-bounded areas. The conference proceedings opened up new views on geographical and historical imaginations of Europe from within and without, on claims of identity and alterity as well as on the mutability of periphery-centre relations. Moreover, they displayed the wide range of – internationally well-connected – historical research on the early modern period in Germany.
Heidelberg University Publishing (heiUP) is an open access publisher of high-quality, peer-reviewed academic works. It endorses open access as a publishing model to distribute outstanding research results and uses open source software for the collaborative development of underlying publishing technologies. Prof. Dr. Susan Richter is Acting Professor and Chair of Early Modern Times at the Department of History at Heidelberg University and Deputy Speaker of Research Area A at the Cluster “Asia and Europe”. Michael Roth is PhD candidate at the Historical Institute Heidelberg. Sebastian Meurer is a former member of the Cluster, where he coordinated Research Area A. He is Scientific Research Coordinator at the CRC 948 “Helden – Heroisierungen – Heroismen” at Freiburg University.