Research Fields and Themes
The term “applied humanities” is the center’s focal point. We delve into its conceptual underpinnings, aiming to reconstruct how and why the term has been employed in different historical situations and social configurations. At the same time, we take “application” as a novel analytical and heuristic concept, investigating how exactly humanities knowledge is applied and how those processes of knowledge application impact politically upon their surroundings. Such world-making effects can be seen, for instance, in the humanities’ critical reflection on and reconfiguration of social structures, ways of life, and public discourse, or in the provision of specific bodies of knowledge such as visual habits in art history and listening skills in musicology.
In the center’s initial funding phase, we will primarily explore two areas: the politics of practice, and infrastructural thinking in the humanities.
Politics of Practice
Our first focus, “Politics of Practice,” challenges the prevalent notion that the humanities is a solely theoretical domain, shaped by contemplation, thought, and a distanced viewpoint. Instead, we turn to the array of micropolitical practices within the humanities that implicitly or explicitly disseminate “guiding knowledge” to the public—in other words, knowledge that perpetuates cultural repertoires of experience or that nurtures professional expertise and particular techniques of reading, commentary, translation, critique, and reflection.
Infrastructural Thinking
The second focus, “Infrastructural Thinking,” explores the interaction between humanities practice, political theory, collective imagination, and infrastructures such as universities, publishers, funding institutions, and political and technical systems. We examine a series of different historical contexts to ask how infrastructural measures across different regions and periods have influenced thought and action in the humanities, and how the humanities, in turn, have provided a critical space for ethical reflection on dominant social structures and fostered alternative forms of life and knowledge.
Straddling these two research areas, the center will address four topics:
Knowledge Archaeology of the Digital Humanities
This thematic field is dedicated to the history of the analog and now partially forgotten humanities practices of collecting, sorting, and standardizing that underlie today’s digital architectures, data regimes, and tools. We will scrutinize their impact on scholarly publishing, including negotiations over data standards and the dynamics of digital scholarly communication.
Practices of Provenance Research
In recent years, provenance research and the restitution of objects has become one of the most visible instruments of decolonization in the public sphere. In conversation with these efforts, our theme entails a historical examination of provenance research as a multifaceted humanities practice of attribution and commentary, tracing its evolution since the eighteenth century. We aim to historicize the methods and practice of provenance research, an investigation with great contemporary relevance given the global political ramifications.
The Humanities and the Promise of Globalization
In this thematic field, we delve into the discourse of the “Global South,” an originally political-activist concept that has now become institutionalized but is falling short of its initial promise to rectify North-South power imbalances. We seek to deconstruct seemingly universal, but in fact Western-influenced, research tools and ways of thinking in the humanities and to bolster approaches from World Humanities.
Historicizing the Environmental Humanities
The field of environmental humanities emerged in the 1990s to draw attention to the humanities’ crucial role in addressing urgent environmental issues. Our thematic field seeks to underscore that centrality by pointing to the long history of reflection on the human and more-than-human environment. Examining how, in the long modern period, humanities scholars have intervened in enduring debates such as nature versus culture or matter versus spirit, and how they have sought to redefine concepts of life, time, and space, we aim to broaden contemporary perspectives on the environment in which we live.