The course offers an introduction to the origins and the development of the concept of cultural heritage in the framework of European cultural and political history. It also offers and overview on the emergence of critical heritage studies and on the recent approaches of this academic field. It scrutinizes the emergence of patrimoine, related to the French revolution and to its aftermath. In a similar way, ideas and concepts, such as monuments, historical monuments, antiquities, and monument protection will be discussed with the help of historical documents. In a subsequent phase, the participants analyze the role of heritage in the European nation making processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, revealing the link of nation and nationalism studies to the scholarship of heritage. Furthermore, the course focuses on the contemporary varieties of heritage making. It explains the political and social reasons behind the recent expansion of heritage as a key concept and a flexible set of techniques of constructing and representing collective identities in the postmodern era. Case studies taken from different regions and continents illustrate how heritage and memory became powerful alternatives of professional historical writing in the representation of the past. To understand this historical process the concept of historiography and a wide range of research methods (historical and textual analysis, “reading” of landscapes, interpretation of buildings, analysis of visual sources) will be used in the form of case-studies.
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