Marine lecture in the town hall: voyage of discovery into ocean history!

Marine lecture in the town hall: voyage of discovery into ocean history!

On Monday, October 20, 2025, the University of Greifswald will start the winter semester 2025/26 with the lecture series “University in the Town Hall”. The first lecture entitled "With feeling and the sound of waves. A new cultural history of the seas" will be given by Prof. Dr. Sünne Juterczenka, Professor of General History of the Early Modern Period. The event will take place at 5:00 p.m. in the Citizens' Hall in the town hall. Admission is free, which means broad participation is expected.

In her lecture, Prof. Juterczenka will deal with the oceans as a space of experience and imagination. She pursues an interdisciplinary approach that treats the oceans as more than just a natural and economic area. Instead, the focus is on the oceans as meeting places for different cultures in the context of globalization, which began around 1500. Questions about changes in knowledge, perception and emotions when dealing with the sea are also the focus of her analysis. The professor has been leading the lecture series since this year, after Prof. Dr. Matthias Schneider took on this task. Further information about the event can be found on the University of Greifswald website. uni-greifswald.de reports that...

Maps as a window to the world

The fascination of the seas is not only reflected in lectures, but also in cartography. A related online exhibition, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), is entitled "Seas of Maps. For a History of Globalization from the Water". The exhibition, based on the results of a project from 2018 to 2022, places a particular focus on the role of nautical charts. From the turn of the 19th century, new types of nautical charts showed various facets of globalization. They contained references to global transport networks and illustrated the new “world traffic” of steam-powered liner shipping. The maps developed are not only informative tools, but also cultural artifacts that reflect a view of the world as a spatial continuum. humanities-and-social sciences-bmbf.de explains that…

The online exhibition makes it possible to make research results accessible to a broad public and to present special finds in accordance with the open access principle. Positive feedback since the opening in November 2021 shows the great interest. Future developments in virtual and augmented reality are being monitored, and a mobile app is being planned to further improve accessibility.

The stories of the nautical charts

Cards have a multi-layered function. They not only help to tame volumes of data and maintain an overview of complex observations, but they are also aids for route planning and navigation. They also create space for fantasies and desires that are inscribed in cards. The edition “Seas of Maps: Creating a World”, which was published in 2020, goes into these topics in more detail. According to the authors Wolfang Struck, Iris Schröder, Felix Schürmann and Elena Stirtz, the publication addresses the challenges that arise from the reliability of maps, for example with regard to reefs and icebergs. kartenmeere.hypotheses.org describes that...

Overall, it becomes clear that the sea is not just a physical space, but a place that is shaped by cultural, economic and social aspects. The diverse forms of engagement with the oceans, be it in lectures or exhibitions, open up new perspectives and contribute to further research into the human relationship to this fundamental part of our earth.