Research seminar "International, Transnational, Global: New Trends in the History of Science and Humanities"
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:
- Kapil Raj, “Thinking Without the Scientific Revolution: Global Interactions and the Construction of Knowledge,” Journal of Early Modern History 21:5 (2017): 445–458.
- Geert Somsen, “A History of Universalism: Conceptions of the Internationality of Science from the Enlightenment to the Cold War,” Minerva 46:3 (2008), 361-379.
- Geert Somsen, “Science, Fascism, and Foreign Policy: The Exhibition ‘Scienza Universale’ at the 1942 Rome World’s Fair”, Isis 108:4, 769-791. Accompanied by interview video on Isis’ facebook.
- Jan Surman, “How Romance Studies Shaped the Ukrainian Language and how the Ukrainian-Romanian Conflict Helped to Create Ladinian: A (Very) Entangled History of A-political Science,” Johannes Feichtinger, Anil Bhatti and Cornelia Hülmbauer (eds), Transgressing Difference: New Methodological Perspectives for Understanding Knowledge Production (New York: Springer, forthcoming)
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.
Jan Jakub Surman