Ideas in Print: Journalistic Forms in Intellectual History

The workshop Ideas in Print: Journalistic Forms in Intellectual History (5–06 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.