MOTH
Lisa Regazzoni – What does history have to do with physics? Or matter with theory of history? How strongly have scientific models of the material and physical world informed how scholars understand history? To what extent can contemporary models of physical reality, such as quantum mechanics, help us to rethink our concept of historical reality?
Martina Kessel – Democracy today is under serious attack. How does that danger connect to the construction of ‘the modern’ or the ways modern societies have organised themselves since the late eighteenth century?
Maja-Lisa Müller – “Let us not reify containers”. Archaeologist John Robb begins his short article Contained within history with this statement. His approach may seem a little curious, given the key role of containers as material artefacts in history, archaeology and art history.
Editorial Board – A joint Call for Papers by the blogs “Geschichtstheorie am Werk” and “theorieblog”.
Beitrag in Deutsch Post in English
Editorial Board – A joint Call for Papers by the blogs “Geschichtstheorie am Werk” and “theorieblog”.
Beitrag in Deutsch Post in English
Editorial Board – The editorial board has compiled a few reading suggestions for the winter break and wishes you a Merry Think Time!
Shahzad Bashir – Regazzoni’s purpose in The Episteme of the Gallic Past is to show that, in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, the term “monument” had a variety of meanings that underwent significant change with the passage of time. She leverages deep archival research to argue that tracking the term’s multiple significations can help us rethink the evolution of European ideas about history in this important period. I will unpack three valences embedded in the example of a ‘speaking monument’ to help us appreciate the arguments presented in Regazzoni’s book.
Lisa Regazzoni – October 5th, 2025. In Salem, Massachusetts, the temporal horizons seem to merge. In this small town near Boston, the past – specifically the year 1692 – is present in a way I had not yet experienced. Finding words for this post that will convey the unique amalgamation of the past and the present I discovered on October 5th is truly not an easy task.
Sauda Nabukenya – Can court records be more than legal sources – can they serve as epistemological workshops for reconstructing African history? This essay argues that they can, drawing on more than 150,000 case files I discovered, organized, and catalogued from Buganda’s native courts and the High Court of Uganda.
Christian Wachter – How can images reshape the way historians produce and share knowledge? What happens when we rethink the interplay between text and image, or even explore immersive formats like virtual reality? These questions were at the heart of a recent workshop on Multimodal History at the Center for Theories in Historical Research. This post offers a brief account of key contributions and reflects on the epistemic potential of multimodality in historical scholarship.
