Conveners: Mischa Honeck (DHI Washington) and Jan Jansen (DHI Washington).
Academic historians maintain an ambiguous relationship with the present. Most stress that the objects, methods, and results of research obey the rules and standards of their academic discipline; that they are not imposed by present-day ideologies or purposes; that they are not henchmen for non-scientific interests; yet they probably also agree that it is naïve to believe that academic history (or any other discipline) is completely detached from present experience or from questions, concerns, convictions, and values of their social, political, economic, and intellectual environment. Without a foothold in the present, no historian could make sense of the past and consider its significance.
While it is not part of their daily business, historians, from time to time, need to step back from their specific research topics and reflect on the "situatedness" and "embeddedness" of their discipline in the present:
- What is the general "relevance" of the business as they pursue it? What are "relevant" themes, questions, and concepts, and why do they consider them as such? What are their blind spots and where do they come from?
- What are history's responses to present-day challenges? Are the historians' questions, methods, concepts, and teaching "up to date"?
- How close can or should the historian's relationship with present-day experience be? To what extent should they address this relationship in their teaching and research?
It should go without saying that such questions transcend the scope of academic research, and responses to them cannot be generated by the means of the historian's profession alone. Likewise, the answers given vary considerably according to time and context. While at times they may come in form of a tacit agreement, they can, at other times, spark public controversy.
The symposium "The Historian and the World - the Worlds of History" puts the question of the historians' relationship(s) with the present center-stage. Within that framework, we are especially interested in the trends towards broader horizons and larger scales of analysis (global history, "big data," return of the longue durée etc.). As a matter of fact, an increasing number of scholars, professional associations, and research funding organizations seem to agree that the time has come for research to cross (national, continental...) borders, to choose large scales of analysis, or to process "big data." Remarkably, this transformation has come along relatively smoothly, including in German academia, where fierce debates on principles tend to accompany the establishment of powerful new approaches or "paradigms." It is likewise noteworthy, that while social historians of the 1960s-70s have been radically self-reflexive, at times explicitly normative (considering their profession as an agent of social change), and almost obsessed with the question of "relevance," today's historians seem to address these questions more reluctantly.
Despite this tacit consensus, there is still a need to interrogate the extent to which these trends can revitalize history as a meaningful and socially engaged discipline. Several publications on the practice and "relevance" of historical research, most notably by Jo Guldi, David Armitage, and Lynn Hunt, attest to the existing need for reflexivity. Jo Guldi's and David Armitage's History Manifesto, which argues that only long-term approaches can reverse the increasing public "irrelevance" of the humanities, has especially triggered controversy in U.S. academia. On this backdrop, the symposium seeks to expand the debate, transforming it into a collaborative reflection on the position of today's historical profession. By inviting leading historians from both sides of the Atlantic, it sets out to internationalize a debate that has been so far largely confined to the US context.
Taking these debates as a point of departure, the symposium addresses questions that have a significance well beyond one particular branch in academic history. These questions include:
- Genealogy and Contexts: Where does the increasing interest in "connectivity," large-scale analysis, and "big data" come from? What are the overlapping and/or competing intellectual traditions? How "global" or "globalizable" is global history as an academic practice?
- Gains and Losses: What is gained and lost with large-scale and/or connected history approaches? Why, for example, does causal explanation - once a supreme competency of historians - seem no longer to play a major role in contemporary historical methodology? What happens to the disconnected and the non-mobile?
- Normativity and Reflexivity: To what extent do today's (global) historians reflect on their relationship with the present? How (if so) do they conceive the historian's public role? How "useful" can or should history be? What are the underlying, mostly tacit normative assumptions or ideological positions behind the new historiographic trends? Does, for instance, imperial nostalgia lurk behind the methodological critique of the nation-state?
- Markets and Audiences: What strategies, if any, do (global) historians have to "sell" their work to a broader public, both domestically and internationally? Which narrative devices should they use? What media competence should they possess? What competition do they face, and what pressures do they confront? How are new trends best integrated into the curricula of high schools, community colleges, and other non-academic educational forums?
- Criticism and Interventions: Do historians have a responsibility to act as public intellectuals? If so, how should these new historiographical developments affect the public intellectual work they are doing? What are the social and political issues the (global) historian should address and how does he or she strike a balance between academic integrity and public engagement?
Program (PDF)