Caroline Arni (University of Basel): Zeiten symmetrisieren. Rekursive Geschichtsschreibung als Historisierung

Public keynote lecture at the International Summer Academy at the ZfL 2019: Historicizing. Forms, Practices, Significance

How methods of historiography relate past and present, will be the central question of this lecture. The critical potential of historicizing, so we are told, lies in the way this relationship is constituted; as one of epistemological equivalence. While the historical differences between past and present are taken seriously, they are also treated as mutually comparable with the past illuminating the present, just as the present illuminates the past. This thought is expanded upon using an example situated at the intersection between a history of the body and feminist criticism.

Caroline Arni is professor for General History of the 19^th and 20^th Century at the University of Basel. Her research and teaching are focused on social and cultural history, female and gender history, history of science and Swiss history. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as well as guest researcher in institutes in Germany and France.

She is the author of Pränatale Zeiten. Das Ungeborene und die Humanwissenschaften (Schwabe Berlin, 2018) and Entzwei­ungen. Die Krise der Ehe um 1900 (Böhlau, 2004).

Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (VolkswagenStiftung)