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Category: Theory of History in Media

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American (Hi)storytelling: Report #1 from a Real Experience. Written by a Theorist of History after a Tourist Visit to Salem, Massachusetts.

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.

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Multimodal History – Convergence of Text, Image, Diagram and Virtual Space

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.

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Traces of Meanings in Catalogues and Collections. The Eighteenth-Century Mineral Cabinet.

Daria Novgorodova – A museum item has no single meaning but layers of them. All these meanings, both historical and contemporary, interact and accumulate, are unseen but remain a crucial part of its museum essence, and they leave traces. In this contribution, I aim to address the question of traces left behind, engaging with the history of the Mineral Cabinet of the SPb Kunstkamera (1714-1836), the first public mineral collection in Russia.

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Beyond ‘Reading’ Materials: Trace (on Trace) and Value

Agnes Piekacz – In the early 20th century, British colonial government representatives introduced a new tariff schedule in British-South Africa. At the docksides of British-South African ports, colonial customs officials were subsequently tasked with sorting the commodities they encountered into the orderly classifications that the tariff schedules prescribed. The ensuing early-20th century disputes between customs officials and importers over the causational links drawn by the latter point to broader theoretical-methodological issues faced by historians: How do we link the messiness of the objects we encounter to a past we aim to access and reconstruct?

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A metaphor to time

Augusto de Carvalho – The idea of time has received careful attention from some of the most valuable thinkers. As the scientific image of the world is built on the study of changes rather than things, be it in physics or metaphysics, the nature of time has long been a ubiquitous topic. The fact that time is an old but pivotal question did not, however, prevent its most irritating characteristic from prevailing, that of being an improbable, illogical and still insoluble problem.

The life span of a light bulb. Thoughts on the preservation and decay of a changing object

Marcus Wystub – Is a new light bulb on its way to replace the broken one seen in the photograph of the sewing room at the Wäschefabrik Museum in Bielefeld? The lamps in the background apparently provided the workstations of the seamstresses with light until the 1980s. A look at the room suggests they were part of and a prerequisite for the process of producing linen and clothing. Today, in contrast, they lit up the room for me as a museum visitor.
Beitrag in Deutsch Post in English

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Evidenzwandel: On the Historicity of Concepts, Monuments, and the Visual Sphere

Jeffrey Andrew Barash – The brief contribution I propose in the framework of this blog centers on what I take to be a fundamental concept that has emerged in the discourse of contemporary historical theory over the last decades. My analysis is admittedly hypothetical, not only due to its theoretical character, but also because I propose to interpret the nuances of the term Evidenzwandel in a language that is not my native tongue and that has no exact equivalent in English. Be this as it may, the prominence of this concept in contemporary historical theory and its singular role in demarcating the present situation of historical reflection merits an attempt at elucidation.

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Is There a Place for Monuments in the “New Historical Condition”?

Moira Pérez – In recent years, various authors of theory and philosophy of history have suggested we are experiencing a “new historical condition”, which Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm have characterized as driven by the “anthropocenic and technoscientific transformations of our lifeworlds”. The existence of such a condition has been widely debated, as have its challenges and ramifications in relation to long-standing conceptions of temporality and time scale, the human and the non-human, the natural and the artificial, among others. Many of these works are tinted by a feeling of uncertainty, of exploring and analysing something while we are not really sure what it is or what will emerge from it.