Do you do historical research involving knowledge as a socially determined product of human beings and activities? If so, you are involved in the history of knowledge. Whether or not you label yourself and your work in such terms, we would like to hear from you. We invite you to share some thoughts about your work on this blog.
Month: March 2017
‘More than forty miles of shelves’
The handwriting on this fascinating image taken inside the British Museum Library, ca. 1906, reads, “More than forty miles of shelves, two millions of books, and ‘of the making … is no end.’” The accompanying summary at the Library of Congress appears to get something wrong, however: “Photograph shows the book stacks in the reading room of the British Museum library, London, England.” This scene shows an important aspect of this library’s support for reading and research, but it should not be mistaken for part of a reading room.
CfP: Chronologics: Periodisation in a Global Context
Via George Khalil (Transregionale Studien) and Harald Rosenbach (Max Weber Stiftung) comes a call for papers for a conference on periodization.
Epochal divisions and terminologies such as “antiquity,” “baroque,” the “classical age,” the “renaissance,” or “postmodernity,” the “long 19th,” or “short 20th” centuries are more than mere tools used pragmatically to arrange school curricula or museum collections. Terminologies like these carry particular imaginations and meanings for the discursive construction of nations and communities. The aim of this conference is to uncover some of the dynamics behind particular cultural and historical uses of periodization schemes as concepts for ordering the past.
Conference: Berlin, December 7–9, 2017
Application deadline: April 30, 2017
Call for papers
Call link updated June 22, 2017
Some Useful Categories of Knowledge for Understanding Migration
A good decision is based on knowledge . . .
—Plato
I never thought Plato and I shared a common scholarly interest. My research on the millions of eastern Europeans who emigrated to the United States (ancestors of the subjects of Bruce Springsteen songs) at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seemed far removed from what I had once thought were the lofty realms of the the history of knowledge. Even so, armed with two thinkers, Max Weber and Michel Foucault, as well as reams of bureaucratic sources, I started to think about my research in terms of state knowledge in the surveillance and control of migration.1 But what about the everyday experiences of people in transit, experiences as banal as changing trains, which didn’t exactly gel with ideas from the great minds of civilization? Inspectors at Ellis Island didn’t scribble down treatises on free will, yet knowledge must have played a role in everyday experiences . . .
Continue reading “Some Useful Categories of Knowledge for Understanding Migration”
Knowledge and Citizenship
Towards a History of Missionary Knowledge? Impressions from the Conference ‘Mapping Entanglements’
On February 10 and 11, we held a conference entitled “Mapping Entanglements: Missionary Knowledge and ‘Materialities’ across Space and Time (16th–20th centuries).” Broadly speaking, the conference posited that what we know about missionaries is not the same as what we know from missionaries, and it aimed to examine the history of the latter under the rubric of “missionary knowledge.” Accordingly, conference participants explored how missionaries produced knowledge as well as how this knowledge traveled and transformed from generation to generation and location to location. By tracing a wide variety of missionaries’ cultural productions, including writings, maps, drawings, and collections of objects, participants mapped the terrains in which missionary knowledge transpired—within, but also beyond the purview of the distinct missions in which it originated.
Related Events @ the GHI
The GHI’s new focus on History of Knowledge was already much in evidence in 2016. In 2017, knowledge and its diverse histories continue to be a significant focus in our event schedule. We started the year with a session on religious knowledge at the 131st Annual Conference of the AHA, which was followed more recently by an international conference on missionary knowledge.