Global Family History: The Kaundinyas between the Protestant Mission and the European Colonialism, 1850-1945.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Sandra Maß
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 457784238

The investigation of the German-Indian-British Kaundinya family between 1850 and 1945 combines the history of the protestant mission with the history of European colonialism and contributes to three fields of research: 1. mission history/new imperial history, 2. global family history, 3. history of German-Indian relations. The extensive correspondence of women, men and children from three generations allows us to reconstruct the modes of construction of a transimperial family, to make visible its changing ethnicity and to trace its history to National Socialism. The transcription of the exceptionally large collection of letters by the program “Transcribus” enables a time-saving and sustainable processing of the letters as well as their qualitative analysis.The project has four objectives:1. The main objective of the project is to make a fundamental contribution to the mission history/new imperial history, to the global history of families as well as to the Indian-German relations in the 19th and 20th century through the lens of the Kaundinya family. An English-language monograph will complete the project.2. The planned academic staff member, who already got acquainted with the Transcribus program in the run-up to the project and plans a doctorate in the field of new imperial history, should develop his doctoral topic during the appointment and bring it to the application stage. 3. Through the digital processing of the family-related sources in the EU-funded transcription program “Transcribus”, models currently available on the website of the operators are further developed and refined for further transcription projects of digitized manuscripts. 4. The research data (transcriptions) are to be made publicly available at the end of the project on sustainable use. It is planned that the indexed letters, which are difficult to read due to material decay and idiosyncratic handwriting, will also be made accessible to users who have limited time, such as students working on their final theses, or who are not able read the German Kurrentschrift of the 19th century. In addition to the TEI-standard for the sustainable use of data in the field of digital humanities, it is also possible to extract a conventional word file, which increases the readability of the letters.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants