Global Intellectual History: Ten Years On

AHA Session 62
Friday, January 5, 2024: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Mission I (Parc 55, Fourth)
Chair:
Anupama P. Rao, Barnard College, Columbia University
Panel:
Zaib un Nisa Aziz, University of South Florida
Roy Bar Sadeh, Freie Universität Berlin
Samuel Coggeshall, Columbia University
Disha Karnad Jani, Bielefeld University
Charlotte Kiechel, Williams College
Aden Knaap, European University Institute
Comment:
Anupama P. Rao, Barnard College, Columbia University

Session Abstract

It has been ten years since the publication of Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori’s edited volume Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). In the ensuing decade, a new generation of scholars have sought to push the intellectual history beyond the field's traditional focus on European intellectual thought. This roundtable brings together six early career scholars to discuss the prospects of the young but promising field of global intellectual history. Our discussion will focus on key questions relating to the state of the field. How have the stakes and significance of the mandate to globalize intellectual history evolved? Since 2013, what key methodological and analytical insights have practitioners of the field developed? How have historians working in different subfields responded to the call to globalize intellectual history in different and similar ways? And if intellectual history lagged behind other historical subfields with respect to embracing the insights of the “global turn,” what is its status today? While, as the panel’s discussants, we work on different geographies –South Asia, the Middle East, Russia and the Soviet Union, the British Empire, Western Europe, and the International–all of us are invested in theorizing how to study the diffusion and production ideas across borders. We are particularly interested in the history of European imperialism and its long shadow on the history of knowledge, sociopolitical thought, and national and international political structures. And crucially, since June 2020, we have been members of a “Global Intellectual History” working group. Our collective experience offers us a means to consider what Moyn and Sartori’s historiographical desideratum looks like on the ground and in practice.
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