Monika Dommann (University of Zurich): Kann die Hyper-Gegenwart historisiert werden, und wozu? Ein Versuch

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

In recent times, historical disciplines have emerged victorious from cultural crises endowed, especially by politics, with the authority of processing and interpreting the past. But how can historiography contextualize the present, when this present claims not to have a past at all, and identifies itself as an irreversible break from all that has gone before. A hyper-present, whose only reference point is the future. Taking logistics and digitalization as examples, perspectives from science and technology studies and media studies will be combined to examine their potential for a historiography of the present.

Monika Dommann is professor for History of the Early Modern Period at the University of Zurich. Her research focusses on the entanglement between the old and the new world, on media history, economic history, legal history, the history of science and knowledge, as well as on methods and theories of historiography. She is co-director of the Center “History of Knowledge” and was a fellow at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Digital Cultures Research Lab, Leuphana at the University of Lüneburg and the Collegium Helveticum. She is author of Autoren und Apparate. Die Geschichte des Copyrights im Medienwandel (Fischer Frankfurt/M. 2014) and Durchsicht, Einsicht, Vorsicht. Eine Geschichte der Röntgenstrahlen, 1896–1963 (Chronos Zurich, 2003).

Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (VolkswagenStiftung)