"The Prince, the Jeweler and the Mogul: The Paradoxes of an Early Modern Object"

Dror Wahrman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This seminar will be held virtually via Zoom. Registration is required to attend. To register visit, 

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Dror Wahrman is the Vigevani Chair in European Studies in the Department of History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Wahrman is a cultural historian of Western Europe in the transition from the pre-modern to the modern, with a focus on the "long" eighteenth century. Much of his work tries to understand what the terms in the previous sentence actually mean. What are the meaning and characteristics of modernity? How distant are we from our "pre-modern" or "early-modern" ancestors? Wahrman's previous work took apart and then put together again some key narratives that the modern west tells about itself: the rise of class society and especially the middle class; the emergence of the modern individual or modern self; the supposed retreat of God on the road to modernity. In all cases he asked where do these narratives come from and what in fact were the historical developments that stood behind them (which were rarely those they claimed to represent). In terms of methodology, Wahrman began with what was then called "the linguistic turn", spent a decade and a half in materials at the interface between history and literature, and more recently moved to the borderland between history and art. His current work expands through the study of material objects and art to a global perspective on the early modern period .