Signs of Life: Archival Voices, Relational Provenance and the Reconstruction of a Life
- Stefan LüderDetails
6 October 2026/२० असोज २०८३ (मङ्गलबार, दिउँसो ३ बजे)
Research Seminar Series
Signs of Life: Archival Voices, Relational Provenance and the Reconstruction of a Life
Stefan Lüder, Assistant Professor, Department of History, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany
Abstract:
How does a person become an archival object, and what happens when that person speaks back? The presentation explores these questions through recordings of Motilal Gurung, a soldier in the Gurkha Rifles of the British Indian Army who was captured by German forces during the First World War. Between 1916 and 1917, the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission recorded Gurung several times in the prisoner-of-war camp at Zossen-Wünsdorf. Drawing on these sound recordings, along with photographs, military documents, prisoner lists, and archival materials from diverse institutional and national contexts, the presentation reconstructs fragments of Gurung’s life while tracing the relationships through which these traces were produced, classified, preserved, and interpreted. It proposes relational provenance as an approach to archival sources that shifts attention from origin and ownership to the relationships between person, document, institution, researcher, and potential descendants or communities. Rather than treating archival traces as static evidence of a past life, the presentation asks how their meanings change as they move across historical and scholarly contexts, and how reconstructing a life from dispersed archival fragments might open possibilities for reconnecting historical subjects with the communities and people connected to them in the present.
About the Speaker:
Dr Stefan Lüder is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University. Dr Lüder’s multidisciplinary expertise bridges regional and global history, informed by political science and sociology, as well as media and cultural studies. He received his PhD from Humboldt University Berlin in 2024 with a dissertation on State Formation and Legitimation in the Himalayas, published by Springer Nature.
His research explores the history of the Himalayan region and the entangled histories of Germany, British India and the Gorkha state. Recently, he began working on the environmental history of the wider Hindukush-Himalayas, with particular interest in how political, intellectual, and environmental histories intersect across regional and national boundaries.