Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Chair for the History of Science

Applied Humanities: Geneaology and Politics, Anke te Heesen

Her research focuses on the materiality of knowledge-based objects located between science and everyday life and their application-oriented dissemination. In the research group “Applied Humanities”, she will follow the history of interview-based life course research, which as a historical concept experienced its first boom in early sociology and is again becoming politically effective today. For further information visit the homepage of the DFG Kollegforschungsgruppe Applied Humanities.

The Marshmallow Test: Candy, Race, and Personality in Social Science, 1950–today, Susanne Schmidt

This book project historicizes the construction of self-control as a fundamental capacity that, if acquired early, can be of benefit in later life. It investigates the history of the marshmallow test, the definitive procedure for assessing self-control in children and young adolescents, who are given one marshmallow (or other treat) right away—or two if they wait. The project traces the marshmallow test from its first instalments in the 1950s to current debates about replicability, looking at research conducted especially in the US, the Caribbean and Latin America.

Fig.: "The Marshmallow Test." Screengrab via The Globe and Mail’s Youtube (April 2011).

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Fashion: A Keyword in Social Thought, 1850–today, Susanne Schmidt

The scientific and technological culture of divided Berlin as reflected in the museums, Arne Schirrmacher

Not only literature, theatre, film, art and music shaped the self-understanding and identity of people in modern societies, but also science and technology, which increasingly determined them. A comprehensive cultural history should therefore include the culture of science and technology. Berlin and its post-war development seem predestined for a more profound understanding of these societal and political conditions. After all, this is the place where two systems collided after 1945 and where, in a city that was divided but always closely related to one another between its parts, cultural competition took place in various constellations of permeability and isolation. In the atomic and space age and in the times of Sputnik and the "scientific-technical revolution", this competition was fought out, especially in the arena of science and technology. Just as there was a specific Berlin music life, an art, cinema and literature scene and a theatre landscape, there was a science and technology culture in the form of museums and exhibitions, too. Their place in Berlin's cultural history has so far remained open. The project aims to fill this desideratum for the post-war period and to analyse the institutions of exchange and knowledge circulation between science and society - in particular, museums, exhibitions and other forms of public presentation of science and technology such as observatories and science centres.

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Socialist Medicine: An Alternative Global Health History, Dora Vargha

Global health histories are framed mainly through American, colonial and liberal perspectives, even as some contributions of the socialist world, e.g. in smallpox eradication, have been acknowledged. The omission of socialist contexts, however,
distorts our understanding of what global health is. Many parts of the socialist world, like China or Czechoslovakia, provided different approaches to international and global health, e.g. in rural health or epidemic management. Although there was not one socialist template, diverse framings of socialist medicine played major roles in shaping and contesting global practices.

Picture credits: Budapest, 16. July 1958. To Shung Man North Korean paediatrician with Mária Hubai Hungarian nurse and a young patient at the I. Pediatric Clinic in Budapest. MTI Photo: Mária Lónyai. Under extended license agreement. 

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Judging, Healing, Punishing: Psychiatric Politics and Forensic Governance in Imperial Berlin, 1880-1914, Eric Engstrom

The project explores the multifaceted panoply of forensic-psychiatric entities in the Prussian capital prior to World War One. It is structured around three forensic spaces occupied by the criminally insane: the courtroom, the hospital, and the prison. The project analyzes the overlapping jurisdictions and regulative priorities governing the relationship between these three cultural spaces. It draws on an ensemble of legal decrees, administrative practices, expert and public discourses, as well as the historic traces of forensic-psychiatric subjects themselves to triangulate these spaces and understand what it meant to judge, heal, and punish the criminally insane in Imperial Berlin.

Picture Credits: SK Bern: Paul Klee, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 2. Bern 2000. Abb. 1454.

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Data-History, Antonia von Schöning

My research project addresses Digital History from the vantage points of the history of science and media history. It centers on the quantitative, computer-assisted historiography pursued in France, the United States, and Western Germany from the 1950s until the 1980s. Following an ethnographical approach, my focus is on the media technology these historians were working with, their specific practices in pursuing their quantitative historiographic work, and the question of how the computer-assisted procedures they applied to their research shaped the processes of producing knowledge and the “workshop” of History: How did the use of these media evolve to become Digital History? When Big Data found its way into the field of historical research, how did this contribute to new research questions being asked and how did this change established methods such as source criticism? What arguments were made in the debates concerning the development of artificial intelligence and the purported replacement of human historians as subjects by a machine? In reconstructing the historical debate on the introduction of the computer, I am looking to critically examine the claims and promises of Digital History today.

Abb.: Edward Shorter, The Historian and the Computer. A Practical Guide, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1971, S. 32.

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The Non-Aligned Movement and Decolonization of the Museum Field: Yugoslav Anticolonial Museums (1961-1989), Nataša Jagdhuh

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The Development of Social Sciences in German Higher Education, Sachiko Iijima

Sachiko Iijimas main focus is on research relating to the development of social sciences in German higher education in recent years. In addition, there are necessary analyses and additional interviews that took place with former contacts. Iijima has planned additional interviews at two other universities (MLU Halle, University of Leipzig).
The results of her projects are to be published in the Japanese sociological literature at a later stage.

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The Use of the Image in the Works of Three Late Enlightenment Scholars, Léna Pican

Léna Pican's dissertation examines the use of the image in the works of three late Enlightenment scholars: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), particularly in his research on botany and comparative anatomy; the philanthropist and educator Johann Bernhard Basedow (1724-1790), an advocate of sensual education; and the Swiss pastor Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801), the founder of physiognomics, the study of the moral qualities of individuals based on their physical features. Moreover, the image is seen not only as a central element in the work of these three figures but also as a tool for understanding the underlying forms of sociability. The analysis is therefore not limited to the published works but also extends beyond the correspondence to the networks of illustrators who sometimes worked with these personalities at the same time, such as Daniel Chodowiecki (1726-1801) or Johann Rudolf Schellenberg (1740-1806).

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Visual Bureaucracies – A History of Knowledge of Art Dealing around 1900 (working title), Julia Bärnighausen

The dissertation project explores a series of photographs attributed to the Galleria Sangiorgi in Rome and recently rediscovered in the decorative arts section of the photo library of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence – Max-Planck-Institute. On account of their strikingly complex materiality and their revealing visual qualities, they open up a trans-temporal network of different actors, including the photographs themselves as historically shaped and mobile “photo-objects”.

The Galleria Sangiorgi was founded by the Italian entrepreneur Giuseppe Sangiorgi (1850–1928) at the Palazzo Borghese in Rome in 1892. It soon became one of the world’s largest and most successful art-dealing and auction houses. Today it is almost unknown amongst historians and art historians. Like many of his contemporaries, Sangiorgi kept a workshop where the antiquities from his collection were reproduced for sale. The photographs, which were used as reference copies, communication devices and samples, circulated amongst collectors, art dealers, artists and photographers inside and outside the gallery and between its representations in New York, Paris and London. Through partly unknown itineraries they were spread across different archives. A large holding of both photographs and drawings deriving from Sangiorgi has been preserved at the photo library of the Fondazione Zeri in Bologna. The Florentine photo-archive constitutes yet another (epistemic) layer in the sedimentation of these documents, which took on a whole new set of meanings within the context of an art-historical image collection.

The thesis attempts to reconstruct the history of the Sangiorgi family and their gallery as well as examine practices of art-dealing around 1900. This work will be underpinned by a series of interviews and archival research in Italy, France and Germany as well as in the USA and in the UK. Above all, the case study aims to uncover the epistemological potential that lies within photographs if they are not only considered as images but also as material and “three-dimensional” objects with their own biographies.

Picture Credits: Mirror (1^st h. 18^th c.), albumen print on cardboard, unidentified photographer (Galleria Sangiorgi, Rome), around 1900, 26 x 13,7 cm (cardboard), inv. no. 615786, dep. ”Kunstgewerbe” in the photo library, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut.

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The Site of Hygiene Exhibitions: Placing Dresden 1911 in the History of Knowledge

While hygiene exhibitions can be traced back to the 1870s, most historians have situated them in the context of the twentieth century’s health education and body politics, especially in the German case. Thus, the fact that these object lessons addressed and involved not only lay audiences but also a whole range of scientific experts remained largely unacknowledged.

Focussing on the Internationale Hygieneausstellung Dresden 1911, one of the greatest exhibitions of its genre at the time, the project explores the historical contingencies and meanings of both modes of knowledge presentation, mass instruction as well as science communication. It focuses on the specific actors and practices of exhibiting and thereby raises the following questions: How were scientific instruments and objects to be shown and seen in the different sections of Dresden 1911? Which modes of display – old and new, commercial or museological – were at stake? Where did the exhibits come from, be it their disciplinary, institutional, national or colonial points of origin? In which ways did scientists (e. g. bacteriologists, food chemists and industrial hygienists) participate, whether as exhibitors, curators, commentators and/or visitors? Besides substantial written record the project draws on selected photographs, maps, drafts and other graphical materials in order to place Dresden 1911 in the larger history of the presentation of scientific knowledge in exhibition spaces.

Picture credits: Laboratory exhibit in the nutrition hall of the Internationale Hygieneausstellung Dresden 1911. Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden, Sammlung, DHMD 2001/196.60.

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