Levke Harders: Social Media, Public History, and Higher Education: An Instruction Manual for a #Twitterseminar #dhiha8

Lecture within the conferene Teaching History in the Digital Age – Internation Perspectives #dhiha8, June 17-18, 2019 at the German Historical Institute in Paris, co-organised with the C2DH.

During the last winter term, I taught a class on the 50^th anniversary of Bielefeld University, celebrated in 2019. Given my interest in social media as well as in teaching, the seminar combined university history with practical training (archival research and writing) and with Digital Humanities. The class aimed at training students to communicate their own research findings via social media. The young researchers chose various topics to prepare a Twitter timeline that tells a different story of Bielefeld University’s early years (see https://twitter.com/@UniBielefeld50 as well as the blogpost by one of the students: https://50jahre.uni-bielefeld.de/2019/04/03/jubilaeumsprojekt-twittertimeline).

Even though this teaching experiment can be considered successful, I would like to discuss some important aspects of teaching history in the digital age. In my paper, I will present the preparation and organization of the seminar as well as the positive and negative side-effects in order to develop a best-practice-model for similar Public History projects.

Dr Levke Harders is Assistant Professor of Modern History and Gender History at Bielefeld University. She is currently working on a book project entitled Narratives of Foreignness and Belonging: Migration as a Discursive Process in Western European Border Regions (1815–1871), funded by the German Research Foundation. From 2010 to 2013, she held the post of executive manager of the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology. Dr Harders studied German Literature, History, and Gender Studies. In 2011, she received the doctoral degree for her dissertation on American Studies. She has also published on the theory of biography and on gender history. Dr Harders is blogging about her migration project and her other fields of research in her weblog ‘Migration and Belonging’ (https://belonging.hypotheses.org). For more information see: http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/lharders (in German).

Selected publications:

• Harders, Levke. 2013. American Studies. Disziplingeschichte und Geschlecht. Stuttgart: Steiner.
• Harders, Levke. 2018. Migration und Biographie. Mobile Leben beschreiben. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 29 (3): 17−36.
• Harders, Levke. 2018. Belonging, Migration, and Profession in the German-Danish Borderlands in the 1830s. Journal of Borderlands Studies, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2017.1402193.
• Harders, Levke. 2017. Geschichte(n) erzählen in der Blogosphäre? Der Wissenschaftsblog “Migration and Belonging”. IZGOnZeit 6: 66−67, http://www.izgonzeit.de/index.php/izgonzeit/article/view/21/21.
• Harders, Levke. 2016. Mobility and belonging: A printer in nineteenth-century Northern Europe. InterDisciplines. Journal of History and Sociology 7 (1): 87−114, https://doi.org/10.4119/indi-1026.