Knowledge Notes

Occasional notes on calls, events, publications, and more that caught our attention. Please tweet or email us your own items.

NEW PROJECT & CFA for SUMMER SCHOOL:

“Science at the Fair: Performing Knowledge and Technology in Western Europe, 1850–1914,”a 5-year project (2021–2026) funded by the European Research Council that includes a blog, a research seminar series, and a summer school under the broader name: Arts & Media Archaeology.

The EU-funded SciFair project performs pioneering research on the role itinerant show people played in the circulation of information about scientific and technological advances at fairs in western Europe between 1850 and 1914. The project starts from the hypothesis that fairs during this period were not only local folk events but also centres of international exchange. The SciFair team analyses practices of science performance across national frontiers and maps transnational networks in western Europe.

The deadline to apply to the Summer School “Arts & Media Archaeology – Performing Science, Mediating Knowledge” is coming up soon. Early bird deadline: May 1, 2023; regular deadline: July 1, 2023. Focusing on the connection between performance and media culture and the history of science, knowledge, and ideas, the summer school will take place from 4–8 September 2023 at the University of Antwerp.

CURRENT EVENTS:

Happening now! “Colonial Knowledge in a Decolonial Age,” workshop convened by Alexandra Przyrembel of the FernUniversität in Hagen and Jakob Vogel of the Centre Marc Bloch, from 19–21 April 2023 in Berlin.

Upcoming workshop: “Evidence Regime(s) in Contemporary Societies,” convened by the DFG Forschungsgruppe 2448. Evidenzpraktiken in Wissenschaft, Medizin, Technik und Gesellschaft, in Munich, Germany, from 25–28 April 2023. Deadline for registration: April 21, 2023.

[O]ur workshop aims to understand regime(s) of evidence, broadly conceived as the sets of rules and cultural and social norms which determine the ways in which past and present (knowledge) societies have dealt and deal with what is taken as evidence.

Lecture announcement: “Orte, Medien und Logiken der Memoria im Spätmittelalter,” Cusanus Lecture 2023 by Prof. Dr. Birgit Studt at the University of Trier. Register to attend online by May 22, 2023 here: https://cusanus-institut.de/cusanus-lectuer-2023/

CFPS:

Contributions: History of Intellectual Culture: International Yearbook of Knowledge and Society 3 (2024) is seeking contributions, including for a thematic section with a guest editor including up to five contributions. The deadline for proposals is May 31, 2023. Send to hic@lmu.de.

Workshop from 25–26 September 2023 at the Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung Regensburg: “Making Knowledge on Ukraine in the Interwar Period.” Deadline: May 10, 2023.

Conference: “The History of Knowledge,” convened by the Faculdade de Letra, University of Porto, in Porto, Portugal, from 22–24 November 2023. Deadline: May 30, 2023.

CONFERENCE REPORTS:

For H-Soz-Kult by Lucija Bakšić of the Graduate School Global Intellectual History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Franz L. Fillafer of the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna: “Empire of Circulation: Habsburg Knowledge in Its Global Settings,” convened by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, the Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council, and the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, in Vienna, Austria, from 3–6 October, 2022.

NEW BOOK:

Sandrine Parageau, The Paradoxes of Ignorance in Early Modern England and France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023).

In the early modern period, ignorance was commonly perceived as a sin, a flaw, a defect, and even a threat to religion and the social order. Yet praises of ignorance were also expressed in the same context. Reclaiming the long-lasting legacy of medieval doctrines of ignorance and taking a comparative perspective, Sandrine Parageau tells the history of the apparently counter-intuitive moral, cognitive and epistemological virtues attributed to ignorance in the long seventeenth century (1580s–1700) in England and in France.

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Featured image: poster for the Summer School Arts & Media Archaeology as part of the Science at the Fair project, provided to the History of Knowledge blog by the project organizers.

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