Projects sorted by Research Units

Department 1: Structural Changes in Systems of Knowledge

Department 2: Ideals and Practices of Rationality

• The Sciences of the Archive (2010-15)
• Working Group: Historicizing Big Data
• The Science of Statistics and the Politics of Census-Taking
• How our Days Became Numbered: The Development of a Statistical Infrastructure of Risk in the United States, 1873-1935
• Big Science in the Archive: Managing Big Data in America and the Soviet Union during the Cold War
• A Natural History of Data
• Working Group: Machines of Memory. The Archival Technologies and the Genealogy of Datapower (17th- 20th Century)
• Working Group: Endangerment and Its Consequences
• The Regulatory Archive: Science, Law, and Ethics in Biodiversity Conservation
• The Database of Dreams: Social Science’s Forgotten Archive of How to Be Human
• Moral Entanglements: The Emergence and Transformation of Bird Conservation in Great Britain and Germany, 1790-2010
• Biodiversity, Saving Biodiversity: Expert Practices and Public Engagements in Conservation Biology
• Archiving Indigeneity: Language Documentation and the Pragmatics of Decolonization
• Extinction and the Value of Diversity
• Circulation in Nineteenth-Century France: Blood, Water, and Railroads
• Working Group: The Archives of Deep-Time Sciences
• Toward a Quantitative History of Data
• Dream Watchers. A History of Modern Dream Research
• A Matter of Time: Changing Clock Habits in Edo Japan
• Turkey Red Wheat: The American Breadbasket and the Organization of Global Plant Genetic Resources
• Innovations in Indian Mathematical Astronomy
• Leibniz in the Harz: History, Invention, and the Archives of Nature
• The Social Scientific Gaze: The Social Question and the Rise of Academic Social Science in Sweden, 1830-1920
• The Canon under Threat: Objects without Status and Processes of (De)canonisation of Middle Eastern archaeological Finds in 19th century Europe
• Surveying Nature in Central America, 1770-1840
• How to Make Microbes Travel. Bacteriological Knowledge Transfer to and within Poland, 1885-1939
• Collective Observation
• Practices of Observation of Early Modern Physicians
• The Nature of Photographic Evidence
• Introspection in Victorian Political Economy
• Brownian Motion and Microphysical Reality c. 1900
• Practices of Natural History in the 18th Century
• International History of the Atomic Monopoly
• Scientific Observation as a Tool for Conservative Social Reform
• Taking „Nature’s path“ in Eighteenth-Century Britain
• The Role of Vivisection in the 17th Century
• Between the Natural and the Human Sciences
• Epistemologies of the Living and the Emergence of Biopolitical Thinking
• Working Group: Cold War Rationality
• How Reason Became Rationality
• Strangelovean Sciences
• Working Group: The Learned Practices of Canonical Texts: A Cross-Cultural Comparison
• Drawing from Life: John La Farge, William James, and the Search for Truth in Art, Science and Philosophy
• Acoustic Theatre, 1750-1930
• The Government of Techno-Science and Techno-Products at Global Level
• Practices and Paths of Rationality in 18th Century Naples
• Conditional Inequalities: American Pure and Applied Mathematics from the Cold War to the Present
• A Cultural History of Breathing
• Science and the Senses: Experience and Observation in Medieval Europe
• Science and Technology in Italian Literary Journals, 1945-1967
• History of Statistics at the Berlin University and the Berlin School of Economics (Handels-Hochschule), from 1886 until 1945
• The Unity of Nature: History of a Philosophical Concept
• Birth of Biopower in Eighteenth-Century Germany
• Ideal of Proof: Forensic Knowledge Between Theory and Practice in Late Imperial China
• The Anthropocene Project
• Studies of Science Before “Science Studies”: The Cold War and the Politics of Science in the U.S., U.K., and U.S.S.R., 1950s-1970s
• Visualization in Geography: Scopic Regimes in Geography Between Photogrammetry and Digital Cartography, ca. 1930-1980
• Imperial Systematization of the Past: Textual Practices and Canon Formation at the Byzantine Court
• Inimitable Sources: Rhetoric and Canonical Texts (Homer, the Qur'an and the Bible)
• Reliable Books: Islamic Law, Canonization and Manuscripts in the Ottoman Empire (16th-18th Centuries)
• From Philology to Philosophy: Zhu Xi as a Reader Annotator
• Making Sense of Suetonius in Twelfth Century England
• Gods on Clay: Ancient Near Eastern Scholarly Practices and the History of Religions
• Johann Buxtorf Makes A Notebook
• Maryādām Ullaṅghya: the boundaries of interpretation in early modern India
• A Guide Through Textual Practices in Late Renaissance Court Libraries: Hugo Blotius’ Catalogue De Turcis et Contra Turcas
• Allegoresis and Etymology in the Greco-Latin Scholarly Traditions
• Excerpts versus Fragments: Deconstructions and Reconstitutions of the Excerpta Constantiniana
• Obscurity as Textual Practice
• A Medieval Coptic Hebraism? Coptic Adaptations of Saadiah Gaon’s Judaeo-Arabic Translation of the Torah, Their Transmission and Textual Practice
• How Ritual Use Affects the Codification of the Canon: The Conception of Mantradevatā as a Classificatory System of the Vedas
• Picturing as Practice: Placing a Square above a Square in the Central Middle Ages
• Picturing Number: Visualizing Quadrivial Concepts in the Central Middle Ages
• Translating Everyday Experience Into Social Knowledge: Central European Feuilleton Culture Around 1900
• Cultural Evolution and the Free Market: Hayek's Theory of Group Selection
• The History of the Human Sciences
• Gender Studies of Science
• Working Group: Beyond the Academy: Histories of Gender and Knowledge
• Science in the Cradle
• Women, Madness and Psychiatry in France. From Insane Females to Women Doctors (1800 to the present)
• Frederike van Uildriks (1854-1919). New Woman, Universal Savant and Popular Scientist in the Netherlands
• Amateurs by Choice: Women and the Pursuit of Independent Scholarship in Twentieth-Century Historical Writing
• Gendered and Ethnic Knowledge: Mrs. J.M.C. Kloppenburg – Versteegh (1862-1948), an Example from the Dutch East Indies Around 1900
• Creative Niche Scientists: Women Educators in North American Museums, 1880-1930
• Greek Middle Class Women and the Transmission of Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
• Shaping a Family Practice in Twentieth-Century Rural America
• ‘Health, vigor, and vitality within reach of all’: Radium Emanations and Male Sexual Debilities in Twentieth-Century America
• Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Household Recipe Books in Early Modern England
• Woman, Know Thyself: Producing and Using Phrenological Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America
• An ‘Elusive’ Phenomenon: The ‘Normal’ Female Sex Drive
• Contesting the ‘Laws of Life’: Sexual Science and Sexual Politics in the Early Twentieth Century
• At the Front Door? - Women Scientists at the Humboldt University, 1946-1961
• Iron Curtain, Iron Lungs: Polio Epidemics in Cold War Hungary 1952 -1963
• Overland to Lobito Bay: The 1925 Scientific Expedition of Dorothea Bleek and Mary Pocock
• Science for Women in the Spanish Country House (1780-1808)
• Women and the Spread of Biomedical Knowledge in Colonial Uganda
• Eugenics and the Discourse on Reproductive Rights of African American Women in the Twentieth Century
• Birthing Machines – An Introduction to Ambulant Science
• At-Home Observation of Early Childhood Development in Gilded Age America
• The Birth of Gender: Medicine and the Search for the Better Sex
• Science in Circulation: The Exchange of Knowledge among Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, 9th-17th Centuries
• Working Group: Itineraries of Materials, Recipes, Techniques, and Knowledge in the Early Modern World
• Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative (ISMI)
• Working Group: Before Copernicus: The Cultures and Context of Scientific Learning in the Fifteenth Century
• Images and Public Testimony in Muslim-Christian Egypt
• Knowledge on the Move: Scientific Encounters in the Muslim and Christian Worlds, 500-1500

Department Rheinberger: Experimental Systems and Spaces of Knowledge

Max Planck Research Group (V. Lipphardt): Twentieth Century Histories of Knowledge About Human Variation

Max Planck Research Group (S. Dupré): Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe

Max Planck Research Group (V. De Risi): Modern Geometry and the Concept of Space

Max Planck Research Group (S. Arnaud): The Construction of Norms in 17th- to 19th-Century Europe and the United States

Minerva Research Group (S. Choudhury): Constructions of the Brain: The emergence of the neurological adolescent

TOPOI Junior Research Group: Historical Epistemology of Space: Experience and Theoretical Reflection in the Historical Development of Spatial Knowledge

Max Planck Research Group (D. Schäfer): Concepts and Modalities: Practical Knowledge Transmission

Emmy Noether Research Group: Philosophy and History of Listening

Research Network: History of Scientific Objects