KOSMOS Workshop of the HU Berlin
05 Oct 2017 – 06 Oct 2017

Ideas in Print: Journalistic Forms in Intellectual History

Venue: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6,10099 Berlin, R 2249a (Marmorsaal)
Research project(s): Journalistic Forms of Theory

The workshop Ideas in Print: Journalistic Forms in Intellectual History (506 Oct 2017) is organized by Anke te Heesen (HU Berlin), Moritz Neuffer (ZfL) and Susanne Schmidt (University of Cambridge).

As ideas, concepts and theories circulate between academia and the public sphere, their meaning is adapted and shifts. Just as experts and writers produce ideas, so do editors and publishers, critics, popularizers and readers. »Journalistic forms« – publishing and the mass media, feature journalism and magazines – create knowledge and influence academic research as much as they translate scholarship into reportage. With regards to the role of intellectuals and scholarship in public, communication has come to the fore as a timely issue, and the (mass) media constitute a key source for modern and contemporary history and cultural studies.

The workshop »Ideas in Print« explores the relationship between journalistic publishing and intellectual history. Processes of transfer and translation, reception and interpretation are at the core of intellectual history. Yet to date, non-canonical publishing remains marginal to a field which focusses on an established canon of authors, and findings from intellectual history beg for integration into studies of the public sphere. »Ideas in Print« addresses this gap. We think that intellectual history has much to give to and gain from looking at journalistic forms. The workshop has the twofold aim of (1) exploring journalistic forms as new and important sources for intellectual history, and (2) developing an understanding of intellectual history as an interdisciplinary method for studying ideas, concepts and theories as they move between different forms of knowledge and publication, and cross disciplinary boundaries.

Program

Thursday, 05 Oct 2017
 
10:30–10:45
Welcome & Introduction

10:45–11:45
Chair: Philipp Felsch (Berlin)
Peter Mandler (Cambridge): The Language of Social Science in Everyday Life
Susanne Schmidt (Cambridge): The Line between Journalism and Social Science

12:00–13:00
Chair: Ethel Matala de Mazza (Berlin)
Hansjakob Ziemer (Berlin): The World in the Feuilleton: Leopold Katscher and Observing the Social around 1900
Robert Zwarg (Marbach): The Imaginary Feuilleton: The Uneasy Relationship between Essay and Journalism

14:00–15:00
Chair: Alrun Schmidtke (Berlin)
Erika Milam (Princeton): A Vernacular History of Cold War Human Nature
Nick Hopwood (Cambridge): Proof and Publicity in Claims to Human In Vitro Fertilization

15:30–16:30
Chair: Svenja Bromberg (London)
Moritz Neuffer and Morten Paul (Berlin/Konstanz): Theory and Its Audience (Or Lack Thereof)
Marcel Lepper (Marbach): Speed and Delay: Circulation of Ideas in the 1990s

18:00
Public keynote lecture (Jacob und Wilhem Grimm-Zentrum, Auditorium)
Stefan Collini (Cambridge): The Idea of the “Reading Public”: Intellectual History or Cultural Criticism?
Comment by Svenja Bromberg (London)
 

Friday, 6 October 2017

9:30–10:30
Chair: Felix Lüttge (Berlin)
Sophie Junge (Zürich): Traveling Images: Circulating “the Colony” in the Illustrated Press around 1900
Rolf Lindner (Berlin): “…to See and Make Others See the Life of the City”: The Birth of Urban Sociology from the Spirit of Journalism

11:00–12:00
Chair: Philipp Goll (Siegen)
Anke te Heesen (Berlin): The Black Sheep Among the Contemporary Historian’s Sources:
Early Oral History and the Elite Interview
Katharina Kreuzpaintner (Berlin): “Through the Eyes of Young People”: Urban Ethnography in West German Television, ca. 1970

12:15–13:00
Final discussion