Intellectual History
Intellectual History is a research field enjoying renewed international strength over the past few decades. It is a lively field with several new journals and considerable interest from historians, theologians and philosophers, amongst many others. The department has a long tradition within this field, with the majority of current research focused on modern intellectual history from the eighteenth century to the present, though there is also a particular interest in the intellectual history of antiquity. This research draws methodologically on established perspectives such as Conceptual History and the Cambridge School approach, but there is also an active concern with contemporary questions in historiography and the theory and philosophy of history, including questions about canon-formation. Applying perspectives from the field of global history, the research at the Department is concerned with Western intellectual history more generally, rather than with a more local history.
Portrait of a Humanist, painting by Sebastiano del Piombo, c. 1520. The portrait may depict Leo Africanus (al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad al-Wazzān al-Zayyātī) or Marcantonio Flaminio. Image in the public domain.
Current Research in Intellectual History
- Collecting Humanity: Prehistory, Race, and Instructions for "Scientific" Travel, 1750–1850
- The Culture of International Society: Cultural Treaties and the Emergence of a Global Culture Concept, 1919–1972
- The Family Tree: A History of Scientific Imagination
- A History of Ecological Economics as Political Thought, 1980–2000
- International Ideas at UNESCO: Digital Approaches to Global Conceptual History
- Provenance in 19th-Century Europe: Research Practice and Concept
- Self-Erasure and Practices of Motivated Forgetting in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- A Slow Form of Governance? Collegial Organization, Temporal Synchronization, and University Reforms in Sweden, c. 1850–1920