Historical Understanding

Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is Research Fellow at Bielefeld University. He has been assistant professor at Leiden University and Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Zoltán’s recent work explores the challenges posed by technology and the Anthropocene to the human condition and modern historical thinking. He has published in journals ranging from History and Theory to The Anthropocene Review, and he is the author of History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2019) and The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Words (2020).Lars Deile is Professor of Didactics and Theory of History at Bielefeld University. His work circles around intellectual and educational history, history didactics, history politics and theory of history. Currently he tries to bring such questions together in a theory of historical learning which is based on a phenomenological approach.

• Introduction, Historical Understanding Today, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, (Bielefeld University, Germany)Part I: The Historical PresentHistoricities1. The Texture of the Present, François Hartog (EHESS, France)2. Framing the Polychronic Present, Victoria Fareld (Stockholm University, Sweden)3. Caught between Past and Future: On the Uses of Temporality for Political Exclusion, Moira Pérez (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)4. In Sync/Out of Sync, Helge Jordheim, (University of Oslo, Norway)5. Favoring an Offensive Presentism, Lars Deile, (Bielefeld University, Germany)Histories6. Infinite History, Marnie Hughes-Warrington, (Australian National University, Australia)7. History of the Present: Or, Two Approaches to Causality and Contingency, Stefanos Geroulanos, (New York University, USA)8. Theses on Theory and History WILD ON COLLECTIVE, Ethan Kleinberg, (Wesleyan University, USA) Joan Wallach Scott, (Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA), Gary Wilder, (CUNY, USA)9. Can Historians Be Replaced by Algorithms?, Jo Guldi, (Southern Methodist University, USA)Part II. History and the FutureHistoricities10. Planetary Futures, Planetary History, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, (Bielefeld University, Germany)11. Future-Oriented History, Marek Tamm, (Tallinn University, Estonia)12. What Future for the Future? Utopian Lessons from a Global Pandemic, Patrícia Vieira (University of Coimbra, Portugal)Histories13. The Future as a Domain of Historical Inquiry, David Staley, (Ohio State University, USA)14. Periodization of the Future, Cornelius Holtorf, (Linnaeus University, Sweden)15. History and Technology Futures: Where History and Technology Assessment Come Together, Silke Zimmer-Merkle, (Institute for Technology Karlsruhe, Germany)16. Tomorrow is the Question: Modernity and the Need for Strong Narratives about the Future – and the Past, Franz-Josef Arlinghaus, (Bielefeld University, Germany)Part III: Relations to the PastHistoricities17. Probing the Limits of a Metaphor: On the Stratigraphic Model in History and Geology, Chris Lorenz, (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany)18. Against the Historicist Tradition of Historical Understanding, Jörg van Norden, (Bielefeld University, Germany)19. Historical Understanding and Reconciliation after Violent Conflict, Berber Bevernage, (Ghent University, Belgium), Kate E. Temoney (Montclair State University, USA)20. The Cross-Cultural Appeal of the ‘Mirror’ Metaphor—History as Practical Past, Q. Edward Wang (Rowan University, USA)Histories21. Mouse-Eaten Records, Erica Fudge (University of Strathclyde, UK)22. Lines of Sight: The Historical Certitude of Digital Reenactment, Vanessa Agnew, (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)23. The DNA Archive, Jermoe de Groot (University of Manchester, UK)24. Doing History and the Pre-Conceptual, Suman Gupta (The Open University, UK)Conclusion, Historical Understanding Today: Incidental Remarks, Lars Deilie (Bielefeld University, Germany)

With its rich collection of diverse and distinctive voices - each attuned to some aspect or other of contemporary global and planetary problems that tend to undo settled ideas about the historian's endeavor - this important volume bears critical witness to the challenges that presently confront the very conception of 'historical understanding.' The book does not propose any grand solutions but no discussion of where history is at today can afford to proceed in ignorance of this book. A key collection for our times.