Ismee Tames

Background

About Ismee Tames

I’m interested in meaning making in times of crisis and violence and I study the recent past to focus my lens and get a clearer picture. How do people and their societies react to and deal with war and mass violence? What are their expectations, experiences and emotions? To better understand these processes in our past and present world I take a transnational and micro history approach, that I combine with methods from the social sciences and digital humanities. These are some of my recent projects: • Book project on people involved in transnational resistance (with prof. Robert Gildea, University of Oxford): contrary to what we often assume resistance against fascism was not a national endeavor or experience to many people. They resisted outside their countries of origin. Their violent context made them have to reinvent themselves again and again. The book came out in November 2020. • Special issue and EVZ sponsored project on refugee crises and violence induced migration with special focus on how trace the agency of the people on the move in the official documents (with prof. Christoph Rass, University of Osnabrück and dr. Henning Borggräfe, Arolsen Archives). The special issue was published in December 2020. Here you can find the story maps I made for the EVZ project: Transnational Remembrance of Forced Labor • Book project Global War, Global Catastrophe: Belligerents, Neutrals and the Transformations of the First World War (with prof. Maartje Abbenhuis, University of Auckland). In this book we argue that only by integrating the history and experiences of neutral and subject communities can we fully understand what made the First World War such a globally transformative event. It will be published in October 2021 by Bloomsbury Press. My next project will be about statelessness and what it was and is like for people to be stateless. How to study the voices of those who were excluded and made invisible par excellence? How to re-think the nation-state system if statelessness seems to be a constituting element of it? The objective of this project is getting as close as possible to the experience of statelessness from its beginning in the early 20th century until the end of the Cold War. Thus, to better understand the world we’re in now and why we seem unable to solve this ongoing experience of inequality and violence. I also publish on resistance, collaboration, children in war, post war societies, neutrality and total war, integration and exclusion processes. Interested? Inspired? Curious? Find out more on the NIOD website: