This session questions the historiographic operation and the temporal assumptions that are built into it: How might “historicization” itself be provincialized as only one—historically specific—way of understanding a phenomenon? What assumptions about time and agency go unnoticed, coded into the historiographic operation?

Helge Jordheim is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Oslo, and Director of the Centre for Global Sustainability at the same institution. His research deals with concepts and representations of historical time from 17th century onwards in a Western context, especially in relations to ideas of knowledge and the global. Among his publications is a series of articles in journals like History & Theory and History of the Present dealing with theories of multiple times and synchronization. His last book is the collective monograph Lifetimes. A Theory of Time Scales and Life Forms with Punctum Press (London).

Historian François Hartog is Professor emeritus of Historiography Ancient and Modern (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris). His books in English include Regimes of Historicity, Presentism and Experiences of Time (Columbia, 2015), Chronos, The West Confronts Time (Columbia, 2022).