Making Credit, Making Fact, Making Past: History Making at the Crossroads of Science and the Humanities

Lead Organiser: Steven Vanden Broecke (Ghent)

To register, please contact Geertje Bol (geertje.bol@ugent.be)

To embrace a diversity of topics while creating cohesive intellectual exchange, our proposal centers on shared (or comparable) knowledge practices between the sciences and humanities. More specifically, we focus on history making as one such practice. As we see it, this umbrella term covers three different (albeit overlapping) operations.

• Past-making: constructing a past is an essential and integral, but often overlooked, component of knowledge endeavors (Wilson 2017). 
• Credit-making: history often operates as a practice of credit-making. It constructs a genealogy for specific objects, practices, institutional actors, and knowledge claims, and thereby helps authorize or de-authorize them. Such use can thus be epistemic (authorizing knowledge claims), institutional (authorizing institutional actors), or both at the same time (authorizing objects and practices).
• Fact-making: history also operates by isolating facts and data for specialized scientific treatment, using textual sources and methods (‘historical criticism’) typically wielded by historians – but not necessarily by historians or inspecialized ‘historiography’. Such use could be called methodological.

The epistemic, institutional, and methodological uses of science’s ‘interior’ history-making thus offers an underexplored route for examining how the 'hard' and 'soft' sciences have an intertwined history of soft boundaries and shared practices.

Programme 

Thursday, 21 May

8.30: Welcome

9.00: Opening remarks

Session 1

9.15: Julia Boettcher (Erlangen-Nürnberg) "Practices of History, Archaeology, and Philology in the Academia Naturae Curiosorum (Leopoldina)"

10.05: Steven Vanden Broecke (Ghent) "Historical Fact-Making Across Antiquarianism and Astronomy: Pierre Gassendi"

Coffee break (10.55)

11.10: Lionel Laborie (Leiden) "Fighting for a Place in History: The Disputed Genealogies of the French and English Prophets During the Enlightenment"

12.00: Karin Tybjerg (Copenhagen) "History, Causes and Classification in the Saxtorphian Collection of Malformed Infants and Embryos"

Lunch (12:50)

Session 2

14.00: Kasper Eskildsen (Copenhagen) "Materializing Criminal Events: Temporality and the Theory of Legal Proof "

14.50: Laura Loporcaro (Ghent) "Friedrich August Wolf Looking Back: Creating Genealogies"

Coffee break (15.40)

16.00: Abraham Winitzer (Notre Dame) "From Enlightenment Philology to Historicist Systems: Shifting Conceptions of “Sources” in Early Orientalistik"

Friday, 22 May

9.00: Welcome

Session 3

9.15: Jutta Schickere (Bloomington) "Historical probability and the methodology of Wissenschaft in late 18th-century German scholarship"

10.05: Kristine Palmieri (Munich) "Between Nature and Culture: Fact-Making, Historical Understanding, and the Epistemology of Sanskrit in early nineteenth-century Germany"

Coffee Break (10.55)

9.15: Jutta Schickere (Bloomington) "Historical probability and the methodology of Wissenschaft in late 18th-century German scholarship"

11.10: Josephine Musil-Gutsch (Munich) "Claiming the Origins of Alchemy: How the History of ChemistryPositioned Itself between Philology and the Sciences"

12.00: Sjang Ten Hagen (Utrecht) "Historical Research in a Leading Nineteenth-Century Physics Journal"

Lunch Break (12.50)

Session 4

14.00 Kim Hajek (Munich) "Making Therapy History: Textual and Epistemic Functions in Psychotherapeutic Case-Writing, 1880s-1940s"

14.50: Karin Nickelsen (Munich): "Making Histories of Plants and Cultures, 1860s–1890s"

Coffee and Closing (15.40)