Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Chair for the History of Science

Research projects

Faculty Research Projects

Postgraduate Research Projects

 

Interviewing Revolutionaries. Thomas Kuhn, Quantum Physics and Oral History, Anke te Heesen 

(see monograph)

te Heesen, A._2022_Revolutionäre im Interview.jpgHow do revolutionary discoveries come about? Anke te Heesen showcases the hitherto untold story of a Cold War interview project that sought to draw the mystery of the most important scientific revolution of the 20th century from the heroes of quantum physics.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the new physics shone brighter than a thousand suns: Researchers such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and James Franck revolutionized our understanding of space and time, writing and making their mark in the history of science.

Yet it was not until halfway through the Cold War period that these events were recorded in writing: “Sources for History of Quantum Physics” – thus the prosaic project title – endeavoured to collect the memories of the luminaries of this new physics still alive at the time. To this end, the as yet unknown physicist and historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn developed a new reconstruction method that has since become standard repertoire for historians: the research interview.

Anke te Heesen is the first scholar to tell the story of this legendary interview project which grappled not only with the role of desperation, intuition and emotion in the realm of physics but also with the question of how apolitical a science could remain in the shadow of the nuclear bomb.

“Interviewing Revolutionaries” is the overdue consideration of a scientific-historical revolution whose impact is still felt today. At the same time, it is an indispensable exploration of the emergence and effective force of oral history.

Picture credit: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach

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The Exhibition Catalogue as a Scholarly Monograph, Anke te Heesen

te Heesen  Museumskatalog ProjektbildThe 1970s are a crucial decade for the history of modern exhibitions: Not only does the number of exhibitions held in this period increase rapidly, but exhibition themes also become more diverse and new forms of presentation find their way into these spaces.

This Sattelzeit of exhibition history saw the emergence of shows that brought together and interwove both historical and artistic approaches. These  ‘thematic exhibitions’ (H. Szeemann) not only set the agenda for exhibition events in the following decades but also brought forth a new format:  The catalogue gradually ascen-ded to the rank of a scholarly monograph.

 

Picture credits: Cover of the "Kölner-Römer Illustrierten, Vol. I", edited by the Römisch-Germanischens Museum Cologne, 1974.

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The Marshmallow Test: Candy, Race, and Personality in Social Science, 1950–today, Susanne Schmidt

GMThis book project historicizes the construction of self-control as a fundamental capacity that, if acquired early, can be of benefit in later life. It investigates the history of the marshmallow test, the definitive procedure for assessing self-control in children and young adolescents, who are given one marshmallow (or other treat) right away—or two if they wait. The project traces the marshmallow test from its first instalments in the 1950s to current debates about replicability, looking at research conducted especially in the US, the Caribbean and Latin America.

Fig.: "The Marshmallow Test." Screengrab via The Globe and Mail’s Youtube (April 2011).

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Fashion: A Keyword in Social Thought, 1850–today, Susanne Schmidt

Susanne Schmidt Projektbild Mode“Fashion” refers to the latest style of clothing, but the term has also been used to describe and evaluate changing social and ethical norms, cultural habits, patterns of behaviour, and even political attitudes and scientific theory. This project examines fashion as a catchword in social thought, asking for its changing meanings and function in nineteenth- and twentieth-century legal thought and political theory, cultural history, sociology, mass communication and survey research. Making visible an ambiguous, broad notion of fashion in which the material and the conceptual intersect, this research contributes to an understanding of fashion as an ethical, economic, political, and epistemological concept.

Fig.: Collection of paper patterns (C) Dahin/Shutterstock.com.

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Before the Two Cultures. How the Sciences and the Humanities grew apart, Fabian Krämer

Few beliefs about the nature of academic knowledge appear to be less problematic and are more deeply ingrained than the assumption that a wide gulf divides the natural sciences and the humaWilhelm_Dilthey_zZ_seiner_Verlobung.jpgnities. The happy phrase “two cultures”, invented and devised by the British physical chemist and novelist C.P. Snow against the backdrop of the Cold War, has over the past decades assumed an a-historical ring. But like many other dichotomies that characterize modernity, this binary opposition is younger than we tend to think. While some of its roots go back to the early modern period, it was largely in the long nineteenth century that academics began to develop a sense of belonging to either the sciences or the humanities. While the emergence of the “great divide” constituted one of the most fundamental transformations in the history of knowledge, its history largely remains to be written.

Wilhelm Dilthey zur Zeit seiner Verlobung, circa 1855 via Wikimedia Commons, gemeinfrei.
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Vergangenheitsbewältigung as Applied Humanities: History and Psychoanalysis in West Germany, ca. 1949-1990

unfähigkeit_gemeinfrei.jpg

The term Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coping with with the past), or more rarely Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit, refers to the way in which (mostly Western) German society has publicly dealt with the German past and especially with the crimes of National Socialism. Today, this process is usually regarded as successful and completed and considered as an integral part of the identity of the now reunified German state. In the context of the research project proposed here, it shall be historicized. Vergangenheitsbewältigung will be examined from the perspective of the application of knowledge that originated in the humanities. The focus is on the (1) historiographical and (2) psychoanalytical discourse in the Federal Republic of Germany (FDR) from the 1950s to the 1980s. Case studies on the publication and reception of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's "Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern" (The Inability to Mourn, 1967) and on the so-called Historiker-streit (Historians' Dispute) of 1986/87 will serve to examine the ways in which humanistic expertise was used to shape the ways in which the German National Socialist past was treated in and what repercussions this had on the pesona of the humanities scholar.

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Encyclopedias in the Short 20th Century, Mathias Grote

grote handbook 2Feature story about the joint publication project "Learning by the Book - Handbooks and Manuals in the History of Science"

 

The history of modern science has been primarily concerned with the question of how new knowledge is established. In contrast, it has often been overlooked that the systematization and preservation of knowledge, have been of utmost relevance for productive sciences. Encyclopedias, handbooks and comparable reference works have fulfilled this role, especially so in times of inflation of knowledge, controversy or doubt. While “encyclopedisms” of the early modern period have been historically well researched and the omnipresent internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has attracted some attention, encyclopedic knowledge of the modern sciences before the advent of the PC in the office and library has been little researched so far. This includes decidedly philosophical and political projects such as Otto Neurath's International Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences, but also large-scale handbook series (e.g. Emil Abderhalden's Handbuch der biologischen Arbeitsmethoden, Bergey's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology, Gmelin's Handbuch der anorganischen Chemie). The relevance of such a canonizing handbook science (Handbuchwissenschaft) for research and teaching, however, already caught the eye of Polish epistemologist and bacteriologist Ludwik Fleck, a vigilant observer of his day’s sciences. This project will inquire, for example, which actors and institutions were enrolled in systematizing the constantly growing body of knowledge.

grote handbook 1 Moreover, it will be examined which forms of the book or precursors of today’s databases and search engines were created by scholars, institutions, and publishers long before the internet in order to preserve and make accessible general or extremely specialized knowledge. Technical and economic factors influencing the development of handbook science need to be taken into account as well as the issue to what extent encyclopedisms have been and remain political projects. Not least in light of the dramatic current changes in scholarly writing, publishing, and reading, implicit in keywords such as paywall, open access, big publishing, or preprints – this complex of problems is of the greatest interest for a critical reflection on science and its media. Interrogating innovation- and novelty-centered narratives of scientific development, this analysis of encyclopedias and handbooks will also help to conceptualize epistemic processes beyond innovation and novelty.

Picture credits: Volumes of Emil Abderhalden‘s Handbuch der biologischen Arbeitsmethoden, 1920-1939, photographs by M. Grote.

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"Worlds built from the small" - An Ecological History of Microbes and Humans, Mathias Grote

Grote_Ehrenberg_Infusionsthierchen_Titel.jpgThe SARS-COV2 pandemic has dramatically exacerbated the difficult relationship of humans and microbes: Practices of disinfection and compartmentalization have become commonplace and even talk of a "war" on microbes has resurfaced. This friend-foe dichotomy, often simplified in the media, contrasts with an ecological perspective on microorganisms that conceives of diseases less as "invasions" by hostile bacteria or viruses than as disruptions of the interaction of different organisms depending on multiple causes. What is more, in light of insights from ecology and genomics, the notion of a productive role of microbes for planetary life has gained a foothold recently. As epitomized in the key term of the microbiome, these include wonder about the abundance, abilities, and interactions of these small forms of life.

In a first step, I will write an early history of microbes before the microbiology of Pasteur and Kochs time: the naturalist Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg (1793-1876) sketched an ecological microbiology avant la lettre by investigating the microscopic life of air, water, or soil. His studies of the subterranean life of Berlin’s and his explanations of "blood miracles" in cholera times gave microbes a wide publicity and reveal the philosophical as well as the political stakes of science around 1848.

In a second step, microbe research between medicine, life sciences and biotechnologies since c. 1970 will be explored, pursuing also the aim of liberating the history of microbiology from a narrow focus on the "Golden Age" of Pasteur, Koch and the aftermath. The aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the scientific present. In order to understand this complex recent history, a group of international experts led jointly with medical historian Christoph Gradmann will examine topics such as biotechnology, epidemiology, infection biology, ecology or taxonomy.

 

Picture Credits: Ehrenberg, C. G., Die Infusionsthierchen als vollkommene Organismen (Cover), Leipzig, Voss, 1838.

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Membranes to Molecular Machines. Active Matter and the Remaking of Life, Mathias Grote

(see monograph)

Today’s sciences tell us that our bodies are filled with a fleet of the molecular machinery that orchestrates all sorts of life processes. When we think, our brain cells’ “membrane channels” open and close, when we run, tiny “motors” in our muscle membranes spin, and when we see, the light operates “molecular switches” in our eyes and nerve. When we suffer from a disease, a doctor may prescribe us a pill “blocking” a specific part of such machinery. These examples also hint at the fact that a molecular-mechanical vision of life has become part and parcel of everyday practices around the globe, as much as it has become big business.

This book tells the story of how science and technologies have shaped this molecular-mechanical vision of life in the late 20th century, thereby adding a contemporary chapter to the philosophical problem of the relationship between organisms and machines that have been lingering since the days of Descartes. The concrete historical example provided by this book also allows us to put flesh on the bones of philosophical discussions on mechanisms, which often remain abstract and bound to a few textbook examples.

By following the unwritten history of cell membranes (an essential feature of life just as genes) this book explores how life’s molecular machinery was shaped by the experimental investigation – by taking life apart to its components and putting it back together, by re-making and modelling biological processes in the test tube.

Grote Cover MembranesAfter the postwar heyday of genetics, membranes became a next big thing around 1970, leading to a veritable “membrane moment,” in which fields such as bioenergetics, neurobiology or synthetic biologies moved centre stage, significantly reshaping the landscape of the life sciences and highlighting the relevance of chemistry to what this field is today.

Set in America, the UK and West-Germany of the 1970s and 1980s, the story of membranes and molecular machines involved a number of key institutions (such as the University of California at San Francisco, Cambridge’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology or the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich) and characters that were to shape their fields for decades. Biophysicist Richard Henderson, for example, shared a Nobel Prize in 2017 for his electron microscopy work on a “molecular pump” described in this book. Not least, this book also tells an astonishing episode of how 1980s scientists, tinkerers and tech-enthusiasts attempted to turn molecular machinery into working technologies such as “biochips” or “biocomputers,” which represents an early and unexpected chapter in the development of nanotechnologies. Currently, the history of membranes and molecular machines is highly relevant. This not least since optogenetics, a hotbed of activity at the crossroads of science, biotech and medicine, engineers the machine-like components of cells and bodies, setting out to change again how contemporary societies conceive of life and matter and how we act on both.

Picture Credits:  Grote, M., Membranes to Molecular Machines. Active Matter and the Remaking of Life (Cover), University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2019.

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Hands-on History. Towards a History of Interactivity through Looking at the Development of the Science Museums and Centers, Arne Schirrmacher

190430 Schirrmacher Projektbild

The history of scientific-technical modernity as the formative culture of the Western world is both a history of experience and a history of transmission - and thus above all a history of media. Instead of looking at print media or audiovisual media, the project focuses on the
exhibition medium with its qualities of directness, materiality and interactivity. Since the French Revolution, the science museum has been set in motion time and again as a "political machine" to generate scientific images or to recruit engineers. Interactivity became the bait to catch the "technological citizen" and to commit him or her to participate in social agendas. Since the end of the 1960s, the interactive science centre has aroused new enthusiasm for the phenomena of science, but with its history and consequences, it did not take it as seriously. Today, in turn, citizens should discuss future paths with politicians in the "participatory museum" and thus help to legitimize them.

On closer inspection, it becomes soon apparent that the fashionable concept of interactivity is anything but well-defined; rather, it unites many, sometimes contradictory layers of meaning. In the framework of a Hands-on History, which considers the use of demonstration models and interactive forms of representation in science museums, exhibitions and science centres for the 20th century and pursues their mobility institutionally and geographically, the concept of interactivity will also be historicised. In this way, the discussion about the politics of display of individual objects or exhibitions will be expanded to include general mechanisms, and historical developments in the interlocking of the transmission media of science on the one hand and politics and society on the other will be revealed.

Picture credits: Drawing by Hugo Kükelhaus, Geräte zum Erleben von Naturgesetzen im Spiel konzipiert u.a. für die Weltausstellung 1967. Source: hugo-kuekelhaus.de

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Knowledge of the Unknown. On the Emergence and Functional Logic of the So-called "Dark Figure" in the 19th Century, Sophie Ledebur

190219 Lebedur projektbildThe “dark figure” is a term used in statistics to refer to hidden events that are nevertheless assumed to happen. In common parlance, it has enjoyed some success as a compelling argument in security policy. As a construct that expresses suspicion, it has the power to fan fear, encourage speculation, generate extrapolation and trigger research. The issue of hidden, unreported crime has been the object of “dark field” research (e.g. victimization surveys) in Germany since the early 1970s. Over the last two decades, in particular, darkfield studies have featured within large-scale research programmes aimed at optimising crime prevention. While there has been an upsurge of this work, the history of this “knowledge of the unknown” has remained largely in the dark.

Talk of a (usually big) ‘dark figure’ plays its part both in the horror inspired by an unfathomable abyss and in the promise of ready-made solutions. The epistemic status of this construct caught in a limbo between knowledge and unknowledge has been underdetermined. In German, the term ‘Dunkelziffer’ (‘dark number’) was coined in 1908. However, concerns about a disconnect between actual incidents and the ability to capture the facts date back to the late 18th century. The history of the dark figure avant la lettre is explored by analysing selected themes drawn both from the health sector and from crime policy. Questions are asked about the historical circumstances that made unsecured knowledge become an object of attention and opened up fields of intervention. Contemporary quests targeting activities at the heart of public life that were believed to be shrouded in danger cannot be seen in isolation from techniques for mapping unknown territories. These methods were seen as a new way to render the ‘essence’ of social collectives visible. The project focuses on uses of the construct of (un)knowledge and on the demands and policies set in motion as a result. This dynamic relationship enables us to cast light on state practices of governance from a perspective of (un)knowledge. The research aims to contribute to a history of social governance by examining techniques that reference danger.

Picture credits: C.P.T. Schwencken: Aktenmäßige Nachrichten von dem Gauner- und Vagabunden-Gesindel, sowie von einzelnen professionirten Dieben, in den Ländern zwischen dem Rhein und der Elbe, nebst genauer Beschreibung ihrer Person. Cassel 1822, S. 645.

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Socialist Medicine: An Alternative Global Health History, Dora Vargha

The project pioneers a new history of global health that, for the first time, incorporates the socialist world - a constellation of countries in a fluctuating political, economic and military nexus distinct from the capitalist West. It identifies the particular health cultures produced by socialism (in all its variety) and explores the impact of socialist internationalism in co-producing global health in the 20th century. The proposed project pioneers a new history that will not only transform our knowledge of historical processes, but will further our understanding of ideas, practices and processes that current global health structures have been built on.

Dora Vargha Projektbild SOCMEDGlobal health histories are framed mainly through American, colonial and liberal perspectives, even as some contributions of the socialist world, e.g. in smallpox eradication, have been acknowledged. The omission of socialist contexts, however,
distorts our understanding of what global health is. Many parts of the socialist world, like China or Czechoslovakia, provided different approaches to international and global health, e.g. in rural health or epidemic management. Although there was not one socialist template, diverse framings of socialist medicine played major roles in shaping and contesting global practices.

A systematic analysis of socialist medicine and international health through global case studies integrates missing expert networks, political agendas, public health models and diplomatic agreements in global health history. This work, in turn, allows us to rethink concepts such as socialism, medical aid, solidarity, development, socialist medical research and health
provision.

Picture credits: Budapest, 16. July 1958. To Shung Man North Korean paediatrician with Mária Hubai Hungarian nurse and a young patient at the I. Pediatric Clinic in Budapest. MTI Photo: Mária Lónyai. Under extended license agreement. 

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Judging, Healing, Punishing: Psychiatric Politics and Forensic Governance in Imperial Berlin, 1880-1914, Eric Engstrom

Klee Irrenhaus

The project explores the multifaceted panoply of forensic-psychiatric entities in the Prussian capital prior to World War One. It is structured around three forensic spaces occupied by the criminally insane: the courtroom, the hospital, and the prison. The project analyzes the overlapping jurisdictions and regulative priorities governing the relationship between these three cultural spaces. It draws on an ensemble of legal decrees, administrative practices, expert and public discourses, as well as the historic traces of forensic-psychiatric subjects themselves to triangulate these spaces and understand what it meant to judge, heal, and punish the criminally insane in Imperial Berlin.

Picture Credits: SK Bern: Paul Klee, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 2. Bern 2000. Abb. 1454.

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Data-History, Antonia von Schöning

2021_Shorter_Lochkarten.jpgMy research project addresses Digital History from the vantage points of the history of science and media history. It centers on the quantitative, computer-assisted historiography pursued in France, the United States, and Western Germany from the 1950s until the 1980s. Following an ethnographical approach, my focus is on the media technology these historians were working with, their specific practices in pursuing their quantitative historiographic work, and the question of how the computer-assisted procedures they applied to their research shaped the processes of producing knowledge and the “workshop” of History: How did the use of these media evolve to become Digital History? When Big Data found its way into the field of historical research, how did this contribute to new research questions being asked and how did this change established methods such as source criticism? What arguments were made in the debates concerning the development of artificial intelligence and the purported replacement of human historians as subjects by a machine? In reconstructing the historical debate on the introduction of the computer, I am looking to critically examine the claims and promises of Digital History today.

Abb.: Edward Shorter, The Historian and the Computer. A Practical Guide, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1971, S. 32.

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Orchard Laboratory: Beekeeping, Plant Breeding, and the Enlightenment Discovery of Insect Pollination, Christoffer Basse Eriksen

Eriksen, Christoffer_Projektbild.jpgThe picture of the buzzing bee carrying pollen from flower to flower is one of the strongest images of ecology and the invisible relation between living organisms and their environment. This project examines how a group of Enlightenment beekeepers, plant breeders and gardeners made the first observations of insect pollination within what I term ‘orchard laboratories’. In the orchard laboratory, where beehives stood side by side with fruit trees, eighteenth-century observers mixed interventionist experimentation with meticulous recording to make observations of the relations of nature at work. Whereas the Enlightenment is often portrayed as the age of classification separating nature into discrete kingdoms, this project tells a new history about the importance of invisible relations and the emergence of ecological thought.

Abbildung: Christian Konrad Sprengel, Das entdeckte Geheimnis der Natur im Bau und in der Befruchtung der Blumen (Berlin: Friedrich Vieweg, 1795), Tab. III. Held by Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz.

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Unifying science during the rise of fascism, Austen Van Burns

The dissertation shows how members of the Unity of Science movement conveyed knowledge across political and professional borders during the rise of fascism. The movement was one of several pan-European projects created by Otto Neurath, an economist and social philosopher who co-founded the Vienna Circle. When Neurath fled Vienna in 1934, he was forced to leave behind the already-fracturing Circle, but he soon committed himself to unifying science with equal, if not greater, enthusiasm than he showed for his previous philosophical work. The movement was intended to help “orchestrate” the natural and human sciences, thus stabilizing the foundations of knowledge. Many of the physicists, mathematicians, logicians, and linguistic philosophers who joined the movement had Jewish ancestry, including Neurath; displacement and violence took the jobs of some and the lives of others. Yet despite their deteriorating material circumstances, the Unifiers stayed as unified as they could. They held annual conferences, visited each other across battle lines, mailed each other manuscripts, and wrote hundreds of letters. Their connections sustained networks of emotional and material support, which in turn shaped their academic pursuits. Against a world of senselessness, they advocated a science of clear thinking which they believed could help defeat fascism and return Europe to political equilibrium. What they could not have known is that by the end of 1945, few of them would remain to evaluate if they had succeeded.

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Visual Bureaucracies – A History of Knowledge of Art Dealing around 1900 (working title), Julia Bärnighausen

julia bärnhighausen foto homepage.jpgThe dissertation project explores a series of photographs attributed to the Galleria Sangiorgi in Rome and recently rediscovered in the decorative arts section of the photo library of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence – Max-Planck-Institute. On account of their strikingly complex materiality and their revealing visual qualities, they open up a trans-temporal network of different actors, including the photographs themselves as historically shaped and mobile “photo-objects”.

The Galleria Sangiorgi was founded by the Italian entrepreneur Giuseppe Sangiorgi (1850–1928) at the Palazzo Borghese in Rome in 1892. It soon became one of the world’s largest and most successful art-dealing and auction houses. Today it is almost unknown amongst historians and art historians. Like many of his contemporaries, Sangiorgi kept a workshop where the antiquities from his collection were reproduced for sale. The photographs, which were used as reference copies, communication devices and samples, circulated amongst collectors, art dealers, artists and photographers inside and outside the gallery and between its representations in New York, Paris and London. Through partly unknown itineraries they were spread across different archives. A large holding of both photographs and drawings deriving from Sangiorgi has been preserved at the photo library of the Fondazione Zeri in Bologna. The Florentine photo-archive constitutes yet another (epistemic) layer in the sedimentation of these documents, which took on a whole new set of meanings within the context of an art-historical image collection.

The thesis attempts to reconstruct the history of the Sangiorgi family and their gallery as well as examine practices of art-dealing around 1900. This work will be underpinned by a series of interviews and archival research in Italy, France and Germany as well as in the USA and in the UK. Above all, the case study aims to uncover the epistemological potential that lies within photographs if they are not only considered as images but also as material and “three-dimensional” objects with their own biographies.

Picture Credits: Mirror (1st h. 18th c.), albumen print on cardboard, unidentified photographer (Galleria Sangiorgi, Rome), around 1900, 26 x 13,7 cm (cardboard), inv. no. 615786, dep. ”Kunstgewerbe” in the photo library, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut.

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The Site of Hygiene Exhibitions: Placing Dresden 1911 in the History of Knowledge

brecht, abbildung

While hygiene exhibitions can be traced back to the 1870s, most historians have situated them in the context of the twentieth century’s health education and body politics, especially in the German case. Thus, the fact that these object lessons addressed and involved not only lay audiences but also a whole range of scientific experts remained largely unacknowledged.

Focussing on the Internationale Hygieneausstellung Dresden 1911, one of the greatest exhibitions of its genre at the time, the project explores the historical contingencies and meanings of both modes of knowledge presentation, mass instruction as well as science communication. It focuses on the specific actors and practices of exhibiting and thereby raises the following questions: How were scientific instruments and objects to be shown and seen in the different sections of Dresden 1911? Which modes of display – old and new, commercial or museological – were at stake? Where did the exhibits come from, be it their disciplinary, institutional, national or colonial points of origin? In which ways did scientists (e. g. bacteriologists, food chemists and industrial hygienists) participate, whether as exhibitors, curators, commentators and/or visitors? Besides substantial written record the project draws on selected photographs, maps, drafts and other graphical materials in order to place Dresden 1911 in the larger history of the presentation of scientific knowledge in exhibition spaces.

Picture credits: Laboratory exhibit in the nutrition hall of the Internationale Hygieneausstellung Dresden 1911. Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden, Sammlung, DHMD 2001/196.60.

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Botanics in the Making (1500–1700): Communication and Construction of the Botanical Science in Early Modern Europe, Julia Heideklang

HeideklangThe dissertation project explores small forms within the context of botanical scientific writings in early modern Europe (1500–1700). A central premise of the project is the strong interdependence between scientific texts, on the one hand, as literary products under specific aesthetic and economic constraints and on the other hand the authors’ efforts to position themselves within both a literary tradition and their contemporary scientific community. The form and content of early modern scientific texts—and in particular their paratexts—are deeply shaped by contemporary scientific discourse; at the same time, they shape that very discourse. Despite their seemingly marginal position, in fact, paratexts play an important role as epistemic catalysts in defining the botanical science and strengthening its independence in the early modern era. The project will analyze a selection of representative botanical works, especially the historiae and Kreut-terbücher, paying attention to title pages, dedicatory epistles, dedicatory poems and other prefaces and their relationship to the larger work. The project thereby aims to offer deeper insight into the communication strategies, literary composition and forms, by which early modern authors shaped their readers’ perception of their writings. More broadly, it seeks to understand the development of botanical science’s self-conception and how this self-conception, in turn, was conveyed to those in- and outside the scientific community.

Picture credits: Title-page of Andrea Cesalpinoʼs De plantis libri XVI, Florentiae: Apud Georgium Marescottum 1583. (digitised by Zentralbibliothek Zürich: NB 721; http://dx.doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-37940)

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Promoting the West. The Expositions of the US Exhibition Section in Germany, 1945-1960, Jonas Kühne

Kühne ProjektbildThis research project studies the American exhibition program in Germany after World War II. It examines the expositions of the US Exhibition Section between 1945 and 1960. Despite their diversity in form, content and visual appearance they served a common objective. They facilitated the orientation and activation of the German audience in favour of a capitalist consumer society. They, on the other hand, intended to integrate the Federal Republic of Germany into the community of values of the transatlantic West during the early Cold War period.

The study is focusing on three main points. First, the US Exhibition Section is described as a transnational curatorial organization, which neither had the purpose of collecting and presenting like a museum nor was it a part of performing or visual arts. For a better understanding of this kind of expositional work, this section will look into the organizational history, the transatlantic actor-network as well as the production conditions under which the exhibitions were put on display.

Secondly, six illustrative exhibition ensembles will be examined at the level of design, content and reception: the travelling exhibition program in the American Information Centers (1947-49), the Marshall Plan exhibitions (1950-52), the Berlin-based expositions “ATOM” (1954), “Kleider machen Leute” (1955) and “Unbegrenzter Raum” (1956), and the trade fair booth on US agriculture at IKOFA in Munich (1958).

The exhibition analyses shall thirdly help to answer the following questions: How did the political environment of the Cold War shape the exhibitions? Against this background, how did the West and East German audience perceive them? Which influences of the history of exhibitions before 1945 are reflected in the examined expositions? How did they adapt and refine preceding curatorial experiences? How did the US Exhibition Section shape the subsequent development of exhibiting in West Germany?

Picture credits: US Exhibition Section staff members with models of an agricultural exhibition, ca. 1947/48, Nuremberg, Germany. Estate Claus-Peter Groß, photographic collection Kunstbibliothek, SMB.

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Insects as a Global Commodity: Collecting Specimens in Early 20th Century Taiwan, Kerstin Pannhorst

The project takes a closer look at the practices of collecting, processing, and trading insects in early 20th century Taiwan, specifically the entanglement of practices surrounding research specimens and specimens collected for the decorative arts. In the „field“, in this case, the mid-altitude mountains of central Taiwan, diverse actors competed for specimens: Some desired insects for taxonomical and biogeographical descriptions, others for research into economically relevant species, and yet others for the production of decorative objects. The dissertation explores whether scientific and artisanal practices stabilized each other, leading to mass production of insect artefacts and insect knowledge.

Lepidoptera pannhorstEarly in the 20th century, Hans Sauter, a German entomologist and collecting entrepreneur based in Taiwan, collaborated with the first director of the German Entomological Museum in Dahlem towards the „mass-fabrication of knowledge“ about Taiwan's insect world. Tens of thousands of carefully packaged insects collected in the Japanese colony Taiwan were sent along global trading routes towards the goal of a successive publication of a „complete fauna of Formosa“. In the same period, Yasushi Nawa, a Japanese entomologist and entrepreneur, sent scores of insect collectors to the island. The animals served both for research into injurious and beneficial species and for the production of decorative objects such as paper fans or postcards made using butterfly specimens. He sold butterfly decorative art via mail order and in department stores in Japan and abroad. Fleas, beetles or butterflies became resources that were accumulated, traded, and turned into artefacts – into „authentic“ representations of nature for research purposes or into aesthetic commodities.  The project follows the insects from the field to the natural history museum respectively the department store. It focuses on the entanglement of the highly specialized practices involved and on the economies behind the global circulation of these fragile materials.

Picture credits: Packaging materials used by Hans Sauter to send Lepidoptera from Taiwan to Germany in the early 20th century. Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, coll. Lepidoptera and Trichoptera. Photo by Kerstin Pannhorst.

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The Autograph as a Medium for History: Ludwig Darmstaedter's Autograph Collection and its Significance for the History of Science, Julia Steinmetz

This dissertation project focuses on the Ludwig Darmstaedter Autograph Collection of Science and Technology, one of the most extensive collections of handwritten material in the history of science. Created by chemist Ludwig Darmstaedter as a general collecting project around 1900, the Autograph Collection makes visible developments in research approaches to the history of science and technology through the small form of the autograph. As this work aims to show, collecting practices, media innovations, and contemporary discourses on the meaning and materiality of historical documents not only exerted a formative influence on this collection, but also shaped how the autograph collection frames the very concept of history. The project contributes to the history of science and technology by focusing on the materials that enabled their creation around 1900.

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Ignorance in the Age of Text: Forbidden Knowledge among Common Readers in 18th and 19th Century Britain, Jakob Kaaby Hellstenius

Hellstenius_NLW_NLW_gcf08102-001.jpegHellstenius’ project is an attempt at untangling the interplay of the unknowledge and reading practices of British common readers in the 18th and 19th century. While common readers were berated by elites for reading “uninstructive” texts that did nothing to change their readers’ material and intellectual poverty — but instead deepened their ignorance — their reading was anything but a meaningless pastime.

The project explores how common readers’ understandings of medicine, economics, intimacy, human nature, and more, were shaped by the texts they read, and their practices of reading and how this, far from ignorance, was knowledge which could run contrary to that of elites, legitimised by different epistemologies and ontologies. By taking the antithetical knowledge of common readers seriously, the project attempts to consider “ignorance” as part of the history of knowledge. Methodologically, the project will rely on a range of approaches, from traditional archival work to methods from science and technology studies as well as the digital humanities.

Photo credit: Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales

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"It's all in the head." A comparative historical-epistemological history of neuroscience in the Decade of the Brain (1990-2000)

"It's all in the Head" comparatively examines the local entanglements of neuroscientific knowledge production on mental illness and political mental health reform projects in the Decade of the Brain of the 1990s. It focuses on the projects of the United States, the Netherlands, and Germany, but does so explicitly against the larger global context, particularly in Japan and the larger European framework of the European Commission.

Campaign of the Dutch Hersenstichtingen "je hersenen ben jezelf", or "you are your brains", 1996.The proclamation of the "Decade of the Brain" by the U.S. Congress in July 1990 was followed by increases in funding and public attention for neuroscientific research worldwide. Although historians of science and science studies scholars have almost unanimously argued that an unprecedented global "neuro-turn" occurred in the 1990s, the local historical differences inherent in these national projects have thus far been mostly ignored.

By comparatively examining these local developments within the global trend toward neuroscientific explanations of mental illness in the 1990s, the project aims to uncover the black box of the Decade of the Brain. It thereby connects historical research on three scientific and policy developments that accumulated in the 1990s but have mainly been studied in isolation: the rise of evidence-based medicine (EBM), market-oriented health reform projects, and big science projects in the life and human sciences such as the Human Genome Project, the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD), and the Decade of the Brain.

By examining how the production of neuroscientific knowledge about mental illness has been shaped by entanglements with particular policy reform projects in different historical contexts, the project aims to help rethink the relationship between scientific research on mental health and policy today.

Photo Credit: Hans de Bakker, Haagsche Courant, 10.04.1995.

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The Exhibition Catalog Women Artists International 1877-1977 as Archive and Catalyst of Transnational Feminisms. A Global Object History, Marie van Bömmel

 

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This dissertation project deals with feminist cultures of memory and strategies of transmission in the context of the seventies. Taking the Berlin exhibition Künstlerinnen international 1877-1977 as a starting point, it examines the catalog of this controversial show as a catalyst and archive of transnational feminisms. The project undertakes a reconstruction of the network of artists, scholars, and activists involved in the catalog's production. It examines the form-finding of their communicative concerns and measures them against the processes of reception in the women's movement, the bourgeois public, popular culture, and academia.

Exploring the potential of the catalog as a material instigator of tradition, the project aims to trace processes of genesis, transfer, and loss of feminist knowledge and to productively confront different layers of time. This concern will also be pursued in conversation with contemporary witnesses. The project thus ties in with the historiographical program of the researched object and wants to critically develop it further in the self-reflexive testing of knowledge-transmitting structures.

Cover of the catalog for the exhibition Künstlerinnen international 1877-1977 © Arbeitsgruppe Frauen in der Kunst / nGbK – neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst

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