International Summer School – HAB - Herzog August Bibliothek

From July 18 to 29, 2022, the International Summer School of the Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel Research Network (MWW) will take place at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. 15 young scholars will devote themselves to the topic “What is the value of things? Concepts of an Economy of Collections”. Applications are open to doctoral students and advanced master's students in literary and cultural studies as well as all subjects related to collecting. The application deadline is March 31, 2022.

Picking up, gathering, or disposing of things is the fundamental constitutive moment of any collection, which is thus the result of a chain of decisions that is always related to an evaluation of things. To this end, the International Summer School will address the value of things and ask, among other things, about types of value, value dynamics, and economic practices of collections. The focus will also be on the collecting and researching institutions themselves as well as on the relationship between scholarly interest in dealing with objects and external indicators of their value. The MWW focus is on digital collections research. Questions about the transformation process triggered by digitization are therefore of particular interest. Concrete digital methods will also be focused on: How can digital methods help to research collection economies?

The International Summer School is interdisciplinary and combines seminars, lectures and excursions with the opportunity for independent research. The Summer School takes place within the framework of the Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel (MWW) Research Network, which was founded in 2013 and is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The conception and implementation of the Summer School is led by Prof. Hans Peter Hahn (Goethe University Frankfurt) and Dr. Joëlle Weis (University of Trier).