Research seminar "International, Transnational, Global: New Trends in the History of Science and Humanities"

Event ended
In the seminar we will discuss the recent trends in the history of science and humanities with Geert Somsen (Maastricht University) and Jan Surman (IGITI HSE) on examples from early modernity to current times.

Over the past decades the history of science and humanities has gradually ‘internationalized’ – in often unexpected ways. Whereas historians in the past took the universal nature of knowledge for granted, they at the same time largely limited themselves to national developments. After the ‘local turn’ ca. 1990 began to stress the context-dependence of knowledge-making, however, international phenomena started to catch rapidly increasing interest. Questions of how knowledge travelled, how locally developed practices crossed national boundaries, and how certain subsets of knowledge were conditioned by, and happening in, the transnational sphere, attracted fierce fascination. This trend was stimulated by a generally growing appetite for transnational historiography. Somewhat later, a turn toward global history made the scale even larger, connecting history of science to empires, to crosscultural spaces that scientific knowledge emerged in, but also to global objects of study like the environment. These turns went also hand in hand with a new vocabulary of talking about the movement of knowledge: “transfer” was replaced by “translation”, “reception” by “appropriation”, and “diffusion” by “circulation”.

In our seminar we will discuss these recent trends in HPS with Geert Somsen (Maastricht University) and Jan Surman (IGITI HSE) on a few concrete examples from early modernity to current times.

Reading:

For more information and literature please contact Jan Surman: jan.surman@hse.ru.

The seminar will be held on Monday, 25. June, 14:00, Staraya Basmannaya 21/4, room 512-L.