First contact(s)

Organising events and building connections are key skills in academia. But getting there sometimes means sitting in front of a blinking cursor after deleting the draft of a simple email for the second time. At least it did for me at some point in July 2025 when I was part of the organising team of last semester’s Kollegseminar together with Morag Wright and Sofia Guimarães. I asked myself: How do you sound friendly, sincere and genuinely interested? What can we offer to speakers with already full schedules?

Actually, this is already the third step. Before drafting and sending mails, basic questions need to be answered. What is the goal of our seminar and who fits these interests? How can we balance disciplines and account for gender equality? How can we also provide opportunities for early career researchers?

The schedule to figure out all of this was tight since we all had only started in May 2025 and the first session was supposed to take place in November. Nonetheless, the three of us put together a diverse programme covering most of the research interests in our research training group and gathering fantastic scholars who were willing to engage with us. This outcome is not only the result of our work and those who agreed on visiting Freiburg, but also the result of the suggestions by our fellow doctoral students and the pointers of those from the previous funding phase. 

These conversations, the reading of publication lists, the decisions all lead to the point of no return, the moment, in which you hit “Send”.

The temporalities of this process have been interesting to observe.

Each email is sent into the unknown and you start to get nervous. How long do I have to wait to send a reminder? What if the invited declines? When will it be too late to ask somebody else?

Then the replies start to come in. Your email didn’t get lost. The organisers’ Slack channel fills with forwarded replies and the team loosens up. Slowly a programme has emerged. From now on, it’s mostly administrative stuff which our coordinator Philip Straub manages masterfully in the background.

Then the sessions draw closer and the next emails are due. How long in advance do you need to send a consolidated reminder with details on travel, accommodation, meeting points, format of the sessions and the dinner afterwards? Too early and it will probably be buried in overflowing inboxes. Too late and you cause a lot of stress and seem disorganised. As with all emails before, it was fine each time. Even the Deutsche Bahn was on time when the sessions finally happened.

In these sessions the range of “empire” was mirrored; the lectures and discussions covered a lot of ground: from francophone Afrofuturism in contemporary literature (Louis Nana, Tübingen) or the role of gender in 19th and early 20th century inter-imperial diplomatic relations (Maximilian Klose, Freiburg) to social time in the Roman empire (Roland Färber, Düsseldorf).

These lectures were also not just a one-off thing. When we began organising we hoped to cultivate lasting connections. We met the people from the “Collocations” project in Tübingen (led by Russell West-Pavlov) with whom we discussed temporalities from the perspectives of literary and historical studies. Sarah Albiez-Wieck, a spokesperson of the newly-established Center for Empire Studies in Münster, joined us and kindly shared a work-in-progress on the global history of the Spanish Empire. Most recently, we got to enjoy Aline Schläpfer’s (University of Basel) talk on politics of memory in post-Ottoman Iraq.

Each session and the get-together in an inn afterwards were not only an event in the life of the research training group, but left impressions. As a historian of Hellenistic Egypt myself, I took not only notes, but inspiration from all of them back to my desk.

If this is true for all attendants, doctoral students, principal investigators, and speakers alike, our small series of talks and discussions has really been a seminar in the best sense. The German loanword stems from Latin seminarium which refers to a nursery garden or seed plot. And each lecture planted a seed which will hopefully grow into more.

It was sown by sending that first email.