Current Issue

REVISITING MONTAILLOU

Ewa Domanska

Based on extensive scholarship in English and French, this article offers an analytical survey of both the laudatory and critical reception of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou (1975). I revisit the Latin text of Jacques Fournier's register and compare it with relevant fragments in the French and English translations of Montaillou. . . . Read more →

THE STUPID NINETEENTH CENTURY:PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY IN CRITICAL POSTHUMANIST AND POST-ANTHROPOCENTRIC THOUGHT

Callum Barrell & Sara Raimondi

This article addresses the charge of “stupidity” leveled at nineteenth-century thought by recent critical posthumanist and post-anthropocentric theorists. The article's first section traces a particularistic reading of nineteenth-century philosophy of history in the writings of Rosi Braidotti and Bruno Latour, both of whom have employed the nineteenth century as an intellectual shorthand for human exceptionalism and its implicit collusion with the present ecological crisis. . . . Read more →

INHERITANCE AND INCEST: TOWARD A LÉVI-STRAUSSIAN READING OF MONTESQUIEU'S DE L'ESPRIT DES LOIS

Paul Cheney

The premise of this article is that Montesquieu, while seen as an Enlightenment thinker who contributed centrally to the development of the social sciences before the period of discipline formation in the nineteenth century, is generally appreciated in only the vaguest of terms. . . . Read more →

MISFITS, POWER, AND HISTORY: RETHINKING ABILITY THROUGH AN ANIMAL LENS

Andrew Flack & Alice Would

In this article, we construct a critical history of “ability” by focusing on the specific case study of dark-dwelling animals and the ways in which they have been understood over the course of modernity. Such creatures were frequently the subjects of assumptions and judgments about what they could and could not do. . . . Read more →

THE ADVANCEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE NOW, OR THE HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Clifford Siskin

Review article on Information: A Historical Companion, ed.Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021)

What role should history play in the advancement of knowledge? Because it was so “hard,” so “unbelievably difficult … to get people to believe” in his Great Renewal, Francis Bacon thought a history of knowledge could provide evidence of advancement—a reason to “believe” and participate in his experiment. By indexing advancement, historians of knowledge could foster it. . . . Read more →

WHY STILL KOSELLECK?

Fernando Esposito

Review essay on Der Riss in der Zeit: Kosellecks ungeschriebene Historik, by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2023)

Those seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the complex interrelationship between Reinhart Koselleck's oeuvre and the turbulences of the Age of Extremes would be well advised to consult Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann's Der Riss in der Zeit: Kosellecks ungeschriebene Historik. Hoffmann shows how “Koselleck's personal experience of the abysmal meaninglessness of history” and his “experiences of time in extremis” formed the starting point for his numerous historiographical endeavors and, ultimately, for his unwritten Historik. . . . Read more →

HISTORY, THEORY, VERTIGO: HOMODIEGESIS IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORIOGRAPHY

Andrew Baird

Review of Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography, by Enzo Traverso, translated by Adam Schoene (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022)

Enzo Traverso's Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography argues that contemporary historical writing is undergoing a “subjectivist turn” characterized by the increasing prevalence of first-person narration, or homodiegesis. Traverso attributes this shift to the influence of neoliberalism and its emphasis on individual experience. This review essay follows Judith Surkis's analysis of the linguistic turn in questioning whether “turn talk” obscures more than it illuminates about contemporary historiography, especially given the extreme diversity of the field in terms of method, object, and approach. . . . Read more →

SENSORY EXPERIMENTS, SENSORY ORDERS, AND AESTHETIC EDUCATION

Premesh Lalu

Review of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling, by Erica Fretwell (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020)

Erica Fretwell's Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling (2020) raises crucial questions about the making of a concept of difference through marshaling the senses to the ends of a sensory order in postbellum United States. In this essay, I argue that Fretwell's book has opened a crucial horizon for rethinking how race and ideas of difference marking gender and disability were remade through the short-lived but deeply consequential science of psychophysics. . . . Read more →

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