Call for Papers: Scientiae: Early Modern Knowledge; 3-6 June 2020; University of Amsterdam. CfP deadline: 15 January 2020.

Proposals are invited for the ninth annual Scientiae Conference on disciplines of knowing in the early modern world (roughly 1400-1800), which will take place at the University of Amsterdam, 3-6 June 2020. Our keynote speakers will be Sven Dupré (University of Amsterdam/Utrecht University) and Florike Egmond (University of Leiden).

The major premise of the Scientiae Conference is that knowledge during the early modern period was pre-disciplinary, involving complex mixtures of theories, practices and objects which had yet to be separated into their modern ‘scientific’ configurations. Scientiae addresses natural history, natural philosophy, and the scientiae mixtae within a wide range of related fields, including but not restricted to Biblical exegesis, medicine, artisan practice and theory, logic, law, humanism, alchemy, magic, witchcraft, demonology, divination, astronomy, astrology, geography, cartography, music, antiquarianism, experimentation, and commerce, as well as climate change, the relations between text and image, and gender.

The Programme Committee welcomes proposals for 20-minute papers from any disciplinary perspective, yet we would like to encourage submissions that seek to examine modes of early modern knowledge formation and application that cross traditional disciplinary, national, geographic, linguistic or intellectual borders. The sessions are intended to foster discussion that transcends the disciplinary scope. We explicitly invite proposals for less traditional formats, like debates, roundtables, or hands-on workshops. Individual papers should include a 250-word abstract and a 1-page CV. Proposals for panels, debates, roundtables or workshops should contain a single 250-word description of the theme under discussion, along with a 100-word outline per participant. The deadline for submission is 15 January 2020. Please send your proposals to: pertransibunt@gmail.com.

Contact Email: 

pertransibunt@gmail.com

URL: 

http://scientiae.co.uk/conferences/amsterdam-2020/

Linda Hall Library, 2020-21 Fellowships

The Linda Hall Library is now accepting applications for its 2020-21 fellowship program. These fellowships provide graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and independent scholars with financial support to make use of the Linda Hall Library’s outstanding science and engineering collections.

The Linda Hall Library holds over half a million monograph volumes and more than 48,000 journal titles documenting the history of science and technology from the 15th century to the present. The Library’s collections are exceptionally strong in the engineering disciplines, chemistry, and physics, but it also has impressive holdings in natural history, astronomy, environmental and earth sciences, aeronautics, life sciences, infrastructure studies, mathematics, and the history of the book. Thanks to longstanding exchange partnerships dating to before the Cold War, the Library retains large amounts of material related to science and engineering in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The Linda Hall Library is pleased to offer three types of fellowships this year:

Travel fellowships, lasting between one and three weeks, support brief, exploratory visits to the Linda Hall Library. Funding is available for up to $750 per week to defray the costs of travel and living in Kansas City.

Residential fellowships, lasting between one and four months, support scholars conducting more extensive research using the Library’s collections. Fellowship funding is offered up to $3,000 per month for doctoral students and up to $4,200 per month for postdoctoral scholars.

A new History of Science and Medicine fellowship, sponsored by the Linda Hall Library and the Clendening History of Medicine Library at the University of Kansas Medical Center, will provide a doctoral student with a $3,000 stipend to conduct research in both libraries’ collections for one month.

All Linda Hall Library research fellows participate in a vibrant intellectual community alongside scholars from nearby libraries and universities, including the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the University of Kansas, and the Clendening History of Medicine Library. Fellows may also attend the Library’s many lectures and public programs.

Please share this information with graduate students, colleagues, or anyone else who might be interested in the Linda Hall Library’s fellowship program. All application materials are due no later than January 17, 2020. For further information, visit https://www.lindahall.org/fellowships/ or e-mail fellowships@lindahall.org.

CfP: Knowledge Systems and Ottoman-European Encounters: Spatial and Social Dynamics. Zurich University 21.01.2021 - 23.01.2021, Dedline 31.01.2020

The research group "The Ottoman Europe: Methods and Perspectives of Early Modern Studies on Southeast Europe“  (http://www.osmanisches-europa.de)  is a Germany-based, open circle of scholars from different fields of historical research as East- and Southeast European history, Ottoman studies and philology of all relevant languages. Our common interest lies in multidisciplinary Early-Modern studies on Southeast Europe, roughly the zone of Ottoman dominance or influence. As such, a special aim is to bring scholarly research on Western Europe and on the Ottoman Empire closer together. We consider the Ottoman Empire with its European provinces as an integral part of Late Medieval and Early Modern European History that still has to be discovered by mainstream-research on European history.
We look to the Ottoman Empire from different angles and are thus interested not only in an Istanbul-centered perspective, but also in studies concerning regional aspects in its European provinces and border-regions - from the Crimean Khanate to Dalmatia, from Hungary to Crete, including connections with neighbouring regions. In this context we launch this open Call for Proposals:

Knowledge Systems and Ottoman-European Encounters: Spatial and Social Dynamics
 
Science, commerce, military, religion and authorities: in all these domains, everyday knowledge was from time immemorial collected and condensed into written knowledge. But content, structure and social relevance of knowledge are always historically contingent. The conference is asking thus for the importance of the Ottoman Empire in a history of European knowledge in the Early Modern Period. We focus on knowledge from or about the Ottoman Empire. We address two broader questions: from a spatial perspective, how can the Ottoman Empire be included into a European history of knowledge? From a social viewpoint: how was knowledge inside or about the Ottoman Empire organized and what kind of social functions can there be distinguished?
 
Spaces of knowledge
The development of Early Modern science was strongly influenced by (west-)European-Ottoman encounters. But to what degree was the Ottoman Empire an object of European knowledge systems? What contexts and players promoted or impeded the circulation of knowledge between the Ottoman Empire and other regions of Europe, including its Eastern parts? Which channels and forms were used for the communication of knowledge? What was the status of knowledge from or about the Ottoman Empire in European knowledge hierarchies and classification-systems?
 
Social functions
History of knowledge about the Ottoman Empire has long been focused on a classical history of science, technology and religion. Only recently, there is a shift towards conceptualising knowledge as a fundamental social practice for all kinds of human interaction. We are thus interested in social practices and discourses and their organizing or fragmentizing effects on social relations. What was the social relevance of different kinds of knowledge and which were the places of knowledge-production? Which kind of knowledge was privileged or legitimized by whom and in which contexts?

With the conference of the study group Ottoman Europe at Zurich University  from the 21st to the 23th  January 2021 we want to address these questions and are open for topics that focus on the pre- and the early modern period and/or their continuation into the long 19th  century. Please send proposals (frame of about 2000 to 3000 characters) for presentations of about 30 minutes in German or English to the following e-mail-address until January 30th, 2020:

daniel.ursprung@hist.uzh.ch

Gerson S Sher: From Pugwash to Putin: A Critical History of US–Soviet Scientific Cooperation, Indiana University Press 2019,ISBN: 978-0-253-04263-7

For 60 years, scientists from the United States and the Soviet Union participated in state-organized programs of collaboration. But what really happened in these programs? What were the hopes of the participants and governments? How did these programs weather the bumpiest years of political turbulence? And were the programs worth the millions of dollars invested in them? From Pugwash to Putin provides accounts from 63 insiders who participated in these programs, including interviews with scientists, program managers, and current or former government officials. In their own words, these participants discuss how and why they engaged in cooperative science, what their initial expectations were, and what lessons they learned. They tell stories of gravitational waves, classified chalkboards, phantom scientists, AIDS propaganda, and gunfire at meteorological stations, illustrating the tensions and benefits of this collaborative work. From the first scientific exchanges of the Cold War years through the years following the fall of the Soviet Union, Gerson S. Sher provides a sweeping and critical history of what happens when science is used as a foreign policy tool. Sher, a former manager of these cooperative programs, provides a detailed and critical assessment of what worked, what didn't, and why it matters.

Gerson S. Sher spent twenty years as Program Coordinator for US-Soviet and East European Programs at the National Science Foundation, before providing leadership throughout the rest of his career to private and public foundations at the intersection of scientific cooperation, international affairs, and global security.


More info: http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?cPath=6040_10421&products_id=809694

Folkerts, Menso / Kirschner, Stefan / Kühne, Andreas (eds.) Nicolaus Copernicus Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 4: Opera Minora: Die mathematisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften. Texte und Übersetzungen. [Minor Works – Works on Mathematics and the Natural Sciences – Texts and German Translations]. Berlin, München, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019. ISBN: 978-3-11-065432-5

Aims and Scope

This volume contains critical editions of all of Copernicus’s minor mathematical and scientific works with commentaries and German translations. Taking into account the latest developments in Copernicus research it includes the "Commentariolus", the "Wapowski-letter on the movement of the eighth sphere", the "Notebook in Uppsala" with Copernicus’s astronomical observations, the "Trigonometry", the "Table of sunrises and sunsets" and, for the first time, all the mathematical and scientific notes Copernicus wrote in books of his library. Furthermore Johannes Werner’s "Treatise on the movement of the eighth sphere" was critically edited and translated into German for the first time since the Editio princeps in 1522.

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Dieser Band enthält kritische Editionen aller überlieferten mathematisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Opera minora von Copernicus mit Kommentaren und deutschen Übersetzungen. Unter Berücksichtigung des neuesten Standes der Copernicus-Forschung wurden der Commentariolus, der Wapowski-Brief über die Bewegung der achten Sphäre, das Notizbuch in Uppsala, die Trigonometrie, die Tafel der Auf- und Untergänge der Sonne sowie erstmalig alle mathematisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Bucheintragungen ediert. Ebenfalls erstmalig seit der Editio princeps im Jahr 1522 wurde Johannes Werners Abhandlung De motu octavae sphaerae kritisch ediert und ins Deutsche übersetzt.

Book can be bought here: https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/526519

More on the series: https://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/234992

Martin Kohlrausch: Brokers of Modernity East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects, 1910-1950. Leuven University Press 2019. ISBN: 9789462701724 (open access)

The story of modernist architects in East Central Europe

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of modernist architects. Brokers of Modernity reveals how East Central Europe turned into one of the pre-eminent testing grounds of the new belief system of modernism. By combining the internationalism of the CIAM organization and the modernising aspirations of the new states built after 1918, the reach of modernist architects extended far beyond their established fields. Yet, these architects paid a price when Europe’s age of extremes intensified.  Mainly drawing on Polish, but also wider Central and Eastern European cases, this book delivers a pioneering study of the dynamics of modernist architects as a group, including how they became qualified, how they organized, communicated and attempted to live the modernist lifestyle themselves. In doing so, Brokers of Modernity raises questions concerning collective work in general and also invites us to examine the social role of architects today.

Martin Kohlrausch is professor of European Political History and head of the research unit Modernity and Society at the KU Leuven.

Ebook available in Open Access.

Mikhail Epstein: The Phoenix of Philosophy Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991). London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. ISBN: 9781501316395

About The Phoenix of Philosophy

This groundbreaking work by one of the world's foremost theoreticians of Russian literature, culture, and thought gives for the first time an extensive and detailed examination of the development of Russian thought during the late Soviet period. Countering the traditional view of an intellectual wilderness under the Soviet regime, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic account of Russian thought in the second half of the 20th century. In doing so, he provides new insights into previously ignored areas such as Russian liberalism, personalism, structuralism, neo–rationalism, and culturology.

Epstein shows how Russian philosophy and culture has long been trapped in an intellectual prison of its own making as it sought to create its own utopia. However, he demonstrates that it is time to reappraise Russian philosophical thought and cultural theory, now freed from the bonds of totalitarianism. We are left with not only a new and exciting interpretation of Russian thought, but also an opportunity to rethink our own intellectual heritage.

Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. Vicissitudes of Soviet Marxism
Part 2. Neo-rationalism. Structuralism. General methodology
Part 3. The philosophy of personality and of freedom
Part 4. Culturology, or, the philosophy of culture
Conclusion
Works cited
Appendix: Original Russian and other foreign-language titles
Name index
Subject index