GSPoL cordially invites you to Dr. Samuel Heidepriem's guest lecture on "Media and Ideology in Modern Constitution" which will be held in room JO 101 (Johannisstr. 4) on Thursday, July 11, at 4 pm. Mr. Heidepriem obtained his PhD degree in German at University of Michigan in 2017 and has worked as a postdoc fellow at Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows (University of Michigan and Univeristy of Beijing/China) ever since.
In his lecture, Dr. Heidepriem will examine the emergence of the modern written constitution around 1800 as an example of the entwinement of media and ideology. Written constitutions were one expression of the flourishing print culture of the late 18th century. Around this time politics, like many areas of society, increasingly became an arena of documents, from the first constitutional texts in the United States and France to the paperwork-driven institutions of administrative government. Constitutional debates in this period revealed a pronounced tension about the implications of written media in politics. Dr. Heidepriem will argue that these debates anticipated key categories of the ideological spectrum (liberal, conservative, radical, etc.) as we now know it, and thus present a fruitful point of contact between political theory and media studies. He will conclude by using this connection to understand contemporary right-wing populism, which he interprets as a rejection of written law.
Further information on Dr. Heidepriem's academic work and his career can be found on his website.
