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Author: Editors
Call for Proposals: Journal for the History of Knowledge
The Journal for the History of Knowledge will be launched in 2020 and is now soliciting proposals for its first annual special issue in Fall 2020. The proposal deadline is January 15, 2019.
This official publication of Gewina, the Belgian-Dutch Society for History of Science and Universities, will be “devoted to the history of knowledge in its broadest sense.” That means the history not only of science and scholarship “but also of indigenous, artisanal and other types of knowledge.” In keeping with the journal’s institutional home, it also has a declared interest in “interactions and processes of demarcation between science and other forms of knowledge.” The journal intends to be global and reach from antiquity to the present.
CfP: Global Knowledge, Global Legitimacy? Transatlantic Biomedicine since 1970
Washington, DC, Sept. 6-7, 2019
Application deadine: Dec. 15, 2018
When the French pharmaceutical company Roussell Uclaff, a subsidiary of the German chemical giant Hoechst AG, was ready to introduce an abortion pill in 1988, American activists flooded the company’s headquarters near Frankfurt with protest letters. In response, the company’s German CEO mandated to stop the project. But the French state, a Hoechst minority shareholder, took the idea across the border, patented it, and embarked on medical trials for the new product in France. Ten years later, scientists in the United States successfully isolated human embryonic stem cells. The country’s regulatory framework had left them free to let the cells proliferate indefinitely. But researchers adopted concepts implemented in Britain to limit the cells’ growth to 13 days after gestation.
Knowledge Notes
- Call for papers: “8th Gewina Woudschoten Conference—Towards a History of Knowledge,” in Zeist near Utrecht, June 21–22, 2019 (application deadline: January 15, 2019), via Marieke Hendriksen (@Ms_History)
- Call for submissions: “Women in the History of Science: A Liberating the Curriculum Sourcebook” (deadline: January 10, 2019)
- Conference report: Migrant Knowledges: Concepts, Voices, Spaces by Andrea Westermann
- Conference report: “Learning by the Book: Manuals and Handbooks in the History of Knowledge” by Alrun Schmidtke (@schreiber_in)
- Blog post: “Copyrighting Cartography with Fictional Places” by Bess Lovejoy at Atlas Obscura
- Blog post: “Reconsidering Mechanization in the Industrial Revolution: The Dye Book of William Butt” by Lidia Plaza (@_p_liddy) at JHIBLOG
Knowledge and Copyright
The Fall 2018 issue of the GHI Bulletin contains a forum entitled “Knowledge and Copyright in Historical Perspective,” edited by Sarah Beringer and Atiba Pertilla. The forum in this free access publication comprises an introduction and three articles:
- “Mondrian’s Dress: Copying (and) the Couture Copy” by Nancy J. Troy;
- “Japanese Industrial Espionage, Foreign Direct Investment, and the Decline of the U.S. Industrial Base in the 1980s,” by Mario Daniels;
- “Why Are Universities Open-Access Laggards?” by Peter Baldwin.
Knowledge Notes
- Lecture series: Calendar of events “in the history, anthropology, and sociology of human knowledges” at the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies, Cambridge University, 2018–2019 (@gloknoscentre) via Inanna Hamati-Ataya (@berytia)
- Workshop CFP: Social Technologies and Global Knowledge Economies, 1750-1850, April 4–6, 2019, Göttingen ( deadline: November 15, 2018) via Dominik Huenniger (@dominikhhh)
- Symposium CFP: Networks: The Creation and Circulation of Knowledge from Franklin to Facebook, American Philosophical Society, June 6–7, 2019 (deadline: November 16, 2018) via Maria Simonsen (@MariaSimonsen6)
- Blog post: “The new, younger generation of scientists is much more open to dialogue with society,” by Simona Cerrato, LSE Impact Blog, August 30, 2018
Long-Term Fellowships at GHI Washington DC
- Term: 6 to 12 months
- Deadline: December 1, 2018
- History of knowledge is one of the thematic possibilities. Others (perhaps combined with knowledge) are the histories of migration, family and kinship, race and ethnicity, religion and religiosity, and the Americas.
- Further details →
Fellowship in Migration and Knowledge
The German Historical Institute (GHI) is seeking applications for a Binational Visiting Fellow Tandem Program in the History of Migration. The fellowship program contributes to the creation of the new research network “Knowledge in Transit—Migrants’ Knowledge in Comparative Perspective” at GHI West, the Pacific regional office of the GHI in Berkeley.
Calculation
Being a human activity, calculation has a history, even if its operations yield “facts” apparently true in any context. One plus one might always be two, but the methods to arrive at such results, not to mention what they might mean, are another matter. Recent histories involving calculation on this blog include Staffan Müller-Wille and Giuditta Parolini, “Punnett Squares and Hybrid Crosses: How Mendelians Learned Their Trade by the Book”; D. Senthil Babu, “Handbooks of the Mind into Ready Reckoners in Print: The Story of the ‘Encuvati’ in the Nineteenth Century”; and Karine Chemla, “Reading and (Re-)Classifying Canonical Instructions of the Past: Commentaries on ‘The Nine Chapters on Mathematical Procedures’…”
Upcoming Deadline for Job
A research fellow position for history of the twentieth century is opening soon at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. The application is due electronically on July 31, 2018.