Crossing borders: New book highlights global stories!

Crossing borders: New book highlights global stories!

On March 28, 2025, the book “Border Crossing – Global History Dialogues” by Prof. Dr. Marcia Schenck published. Published by the Potsdam University Press, this work illuminates the concept of crossing borders in a variety of ways. It considers physical, cultural and intellectual facets and connects local experiences with global dynamics. The editor, who has been a professor of global history at the University of Potsdam since 2020, enjoys the positive response to her work.

The book is made up of various contributions. Students from the Global History Lab at the University of Cambridge present microhistories while teachers share their reflections on global oral history. In addition, researchers at the University of Potsdam incorporate analyzes of borders into their work. This is the result of intensive collaboration between the Professorship of Global History at the University of Potsdam and the Global History Lab at the University of Cambridge.

Content and target groups

“Border Crossing – Global History Dialogues” has clear objectives. It acts as a platform to promote the role of oral history in global history and gives students the opportunity to develop their own research projects, which are published on a website. The target group is anyone who shows an interest in experimental history, history didactics and the analyzes of young researchers from different countries. The book is aimed particularly at students and teachers who want to learn and teach from unconventional perspectives.

The work has a number of pages of 225 and was published in English. It is available as Open Access to ensure broad, global access. This decision reflects the commitment of the publisher and the University of Potsdam to promote the integration and exchange of knowledge, especially in an increasingly connected world.

Connection to other projects

In addition to this book, other important publications are currently being written. The monographs “From Luanda and Maputo to East Berlin: Memories of African Working People of the GDR” and “Mobilidades Socialistas: Emigracao laboral entre Angola, Mozambique e a Alemanha de Leste” deal with fundamentally important topics of migration and cultural identity. These projects demonstrate the faculty's commitment to exploring the interactions between different cultures and identities.

Working with Hendrik Geiling as Managing Editor is a source of joy for Prof. Schenck. It motivates the new generation of researchers and enables the exchange of ideas across borders. This is particularly relevant because the University of Potsdam has so far cooperated with up to 28 partner organizations in this area.

In addition, Prof. Dr. Schenck also highlights other outstanding works, such as “The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee and Global South Researchers,” which was published in 2023. This body of published work demonstrates how important the study of global history is in the current academic landscape.

For those interested, there are also explanations of the concept of global historical perspective in works such as "Global history and history lessons. The concept of global historical perspective" by Susanne Popp. [De Gruyter] These works meet the challenge of presenting and interpreting history from different perspectives.

Overall, the publication of “Border Crossing – Global History Dialogues” shows the ongoing effort to examine and reflect on the complexity of border crossing in history. It remains to be seen what other approaches and projects will emerge in the coming years.

For more detailed information and two-week analysis on the day the book is published, the original links to the publications are significant: [University of Potsdam] and the corresponding perspective of didactics [Uni Potsdam PublishUp].