Symposium: The Cultures of Vigilance. Towards a History of 'private' Watchfulness
Date and Time
Location
Sponsor: Global Information History Workshop
Speaker: Arndt Brendecke, Early Modern History, LMU Munich
Respondents: Daniel Jütte, Early Modern History, NYU and Monika Mommertz, Early Modern History, University of Basel
Arndt Brendecke is Chair of Early Modern History at LMU Munich. His research centers on the history of knowledge, information, and political practices in early modern Europe and the Iberian colonial world. His book The Empirical Empire (2012) examined how Spain sought to govern its vast overseas territories through the systematic collection of knowledge — and why that knowledge was often created but hardly used. Since 2019, he has led the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1369 "Cultures of Vigilance," which investigates the historical role of private watchfulness and attention in society. He is a member of the Academia Europaea and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Daniel Jütte is Professor of History at New York University. His work explores the intersections of cultural history, material culture, the history of knowledge, and Jewish history in early modern and modern Europe. He is the author of three monographs published by Yale University Press, including The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400–1800 (2015) and most recently Transparency: The Material History of an Idea (2023), which traces how Western societies have experienced and evaluated transparency from antiquity to the present. He is a recipient of the Dan David Prize (2024).
Monika Mommertz teaches Early Modern History at the University of Basel. She studied history, philosophy, and literature in Berlin and Barcelona and received her PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. Her research spans the history of knowledge and science, the history of violence, and the history of religion, often in gender and global perspectives. Recent publications include edited volumes on heroisation in science and knowledge production (2018) and on the relationship between body, power, and gender from the Middle Ages to the present (2020).
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Global Information History Workshop
Co-organised by Yuval Givon (Jerusalem), Anja-Silvia Goeing (Harvard) and Philippe Bernhard Schmid (Basel). Co-hosted by the University of Basel, Harvard University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, LMU Munich and the University of Zurich.
For more information, please email globinfohistworkshop@gmail.com.