News

by Kim Hajek In early September, Anne Por (PhD candidate) and Kim Hajek (postdoc) from the Scholarly Vices Team joined forces with Maarten Derksen (University of Groningen) for a conference panel exploring the virtues and norms that shape scholars interactions with their peers. The setting was the 41st annual meeting of the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences (ESHHS) held in Berlin at the Sigmund Freud PrivatUniversität.… Read More »Not in Print: Shaping Scholarly Selves in Informal Settings

by Kim Hajek Postdocs Sjang ten Hagen and Kim Hajek from the Scholarly Vices team raised this question to a filled room of participants at the conference of the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS), held in Brussels from 7–10 September. The two co-presented their findings—developed together with project leader Herman Paul—on American scientists’ use of virtue-talk in the second half of the 20th century. If other historians… Read More »What Kind of People Make Good Scientists? Scholarly Virtues at the ESHS Conference, Brussels.

Caroline Schep (research assistant in the Scholarly Vices project from 2020 to 2022) published an article entitled “Denial of Coevalness: Charges of Dogmatism in the Nineteenth-Century Humanities.” Co-authored with Herman Paul, the article examines how and why philosophers and Biblical scholars in 1860s Germany accused each other of dogmatism. One of the study’s key findings is that dogmatism had strong connotations of backwardness: being dogmatic amounted to being old-fashioned, pre-critical,… Read More »Dogmatism in the 19th century: “Denial of Coevalness”

by Kim Hajek The Scholarly Vices Project held its first in-person workshop since the pandemic on 1 July , asking what it has meant to appeal to authorities in the history of scholarship (download programme here). Organized by PhD candidate, Edurne De Wilde, and linked to her project on the afterlives of Francis Bacon’s idols, the day saw intense discussion of the way four major figures lived on in discourse… Read More »Appealing to Authorities Workshop – 1 July

Project member Alexander Stoeger has been awarded the Lisa Jardine Research Grant of the Royal Society to exploit History of Science collections in Great Britain and exchange with experts in the field. He will spend two months at the Royal Society archives in London starting mid-May to investigate the referee reports for the Philosophical Transactions between 1831 and 1941. Afterwards, he will present his findings at the annual conference of… Read More »Lisa Jardine Research Grant awarded to Alexander Stoeger

On Friday 1 July 2022, the workshop “Appealing to Authorities” will take place in Leiden at the Hortus Botanicus. The workshop is organised in the framework of the research project Scholarly Vices: A Longue Durée History, funded by the Dutch Research Council. (Please see the link to the application form below.) The interactive one-day workshop aims to bring together scholars who are interested in the question of (scholarly) authority, including,… Read More »Call for participation: Workshop “Appealing to Authorities”

For the coming year, Mingqi Kuang (Beijing Normal University) will be part of the Scholarly Vices project as a visiting PhD Scholar. Mingqi is excited about visiting Leiden University and joining the team: “It’s my great pleasure to visit Leiden University, which has a Longue Durée History in oriental studies. During my time in Leiden, I will do historical research on twentieth-century studies on Zhang Xuecheng, a complicated and highly… Read More »Mingqi Kuang joins the Scholarly Vices team

Between the 21st of February and 18th of March 2022, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt (Ghent University) spent four weeks as a visiting PhD scholar with the “Scholarly Vices – A Longue Durée History” team at the Institute for History in Leiden. Her own dissertation project deals with the history of European-level funding for historical research between the 1970s and today (expected defense in November 2023). Among other cases, Marie-Gabrielle looks at the… Read More »Visiting PhD Scholar Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt looks back at four weeks in Leiden

Project member Anne Por has been awarded the Gerda Henkel Fellowship for the History of Knowledge and History of Science. The fellowship will allow for three months of research as part of the IZEA (Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung) at the University of Halle. Anne will start her research on sequential learning ideologies and practices, using among others the university archives, in June.

In December, Anne Por and Herman Paul published a chapter titled ‘Humility and Modesty in the Early Modern German University: Student Instruction at Halle around 1700’ in the volume Representations of Humility and the Humble (edited by Silvia Negri). The abstract of their chapter reads as follows: “Humility and modesty meant different things to hodegetics teachers like August Hermann Francke and Christian Thomasius. Their different conceptions of humility and modesty corresponded to different views… Read More »Book chapter on the history of “humility”