Terje Tvedt, “The Nile. History’s Greatest River and the Confluence of Hydropolitics, Empire and the Postcolonial World“
Thursday, 19 May 2022, 19:15 CET
Senatssaal of Humboldt University
Unter den Linden 6
10117 Berlin
GERMANY
Introduction by Lothar Müller
Comment by Tahani Nadim
Sponsored by:
The Mosse Foundation
Institut für deutsche Literatur
Humboldt University
Mosse Lectures
Description: Rivers are the settings of the formation of civilizations, national identity orders and war conflicts; they are flowing spaces of memory, places of longing, and highly frequented trade routes. They function as “natural” borders between states and connect them at the same time, which is why they have always been used as migration and refugee routes. As such, the world’s rivers are important geopolitical spaces. The currently renewed disputes between the riparian states of Sudan, Egypt, and Ethiopia over the Nile and its water resources, in which economic interests, colonial legacies, but also the challenges of climate change converge, are just one of many examples of the political pressure to which rivers are exposed. In the summer semester of 2022, the Mosse Lectures are dedicated to the “World in River, world in Flux”. On May 19, 2022, historian, geologist, and documentary filmmaker Terje Tvedt will give a lecture about the Nile, a river that remains highly contested in terms of geopolitics and hydropolitics. Ethnographer Tahani Nadim will respond to the Lecture.
Terje Tvedt: Norwegian historian, geologist, and documentary filmmaker specializing in connections between water and society, among other topics. He is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Bergen and a former Professor of Global History at the University of Oslo. Among his many publications is the book The Nile – The River of History (2012).
Photo credit: Niels Leiser for the Mosse Lectures