The Making of the Humanities III

*** Third International Conference on the History of the Humanities, 1-3 November 2012, Rome ***

The third international conference on the history of the humanities, “The Making of the Humanities III”, will take place at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, from 1 till 3 November 2012.

Goal of the Conference
This is the third of a biennially organized conference that brings together scholars and historians of humanities disciplines to draw the outlines for a comparative history of the humanities. Although histories of single humanities disciplines already exist for a long time, the history of the humanities as a whole has only very recently been investigated, and the first monographs have just appeared.

Find the conference handbook with program and abstracts here.

Theme of the 2012 Conference
The first conference on the history of the humanities, held in 2008, discussed the early modern period (1400-1800), resulting in the edited book “The Making of the Humanities” (AUP 2010). The second conference, held in 2010, focused on the transition from early modern to modern disciplines (1600-1900), and a volume of papers is currently being prepared for publication. The theme of the meeting in 2012 will be The Making of the Modern Humanities, focusing on the period 1850-2000, as well as four general panel themes that across all periods (see below). Topics include all aspects of the history of philology, linguistics, literary studies, musicology, historiography, art history, theatre studies, (new) media studies and other humanities disciplines, with an emphasis on their mutual influences, and their interaction with the other sciences.

Conference Panels
In addition to the theme of this year’s meeting, there will be four general conference panels that cover all periods, areas and disciplines:

Panel I: Objectivity in the Humanities
Panel II: Methodology in the Humanities
Panel III: The Search for Patterns in the Humanities
Panel IV: The Sciences and the Humanities

Invited Speakers
Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
John Joseph (University of Edinburgh)
Glenn Most (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)
John Pickstone (University of Manchester)
Jo Tollebeek (University of Leuven)

Organization
Huizinga Institute of Cultural History (Working Group History of the Humanities)
Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam

Rens Bod (University of Amsterdam)
Jaap Maat (University of Amsterdam)
Thijs Weststeijn (University of Amsterdam)