The presentation, firstly, aims to map some of the recent approaches to the study of cultural transfer in and beyond western contexts, which includes (post)colonial and (post)socialist conditions.

While cultural transfer perspectives have flourished and diversified in different historiographical fields over the past decades, they are confronted with some key questions and critiques: some problematize an overemphasis on connections and circulations and draw attention to ruptures and immobilities, others hint to the inequalities of power and agency, the legacies of colonialism, and a Western centrism in the conceptualization of cultural transfers.

The presentation will then, secondly, illustrate these considerations with regard to the study of the history of socialism in transnational and transregional perspective.

Lecturer: Steffi Marung, senior researcher at the Global and European Studies Institute of Leipzig University, Director of its Global Studies Programme as well as PI of “’Free radicals’? Political mobilities and post-colonial processes of re-spatialization in the second half of the 20th century“ at the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199 at Leipzig University.