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After the “End of History”: Reassessing the Communist Collapse

Lenin heads in the trunk of a car.

After the “End of History”: Reassessing the Communist Collapse

This project catalyzed an interdisciplinary dialogue about the period of profound transformation following the collapse of Europe’s Communist regimes and helped forge a new narrative of its meaning.

When Europe’s Communist regimes collapsed between 1989 and 1991, most observers hailed the spread of economic prosperity and liberal democracy across the continent. One commentator even predicted that the Communist collapse would bring about the “end of history,” ushering in an era of global peace and cultural convergence. It is now abundantly clear just how wrong these expectations were. The region has spawned powerful neotraditional authoritarian movements that have contributed to the rise of forms of white supremacy, militarism, and inequity both across the former Soviet Union and Europe. Market reforms produced the greatest economic inequality the world has ever seen and a mafia-connected oligarchic elite that defends its privilege through violence.

This project will convene a series of Zoom workshops to catalyze an interdisciplinary dialogue about this period of profound transformation and to work toward the creation of a new collective narrative of its meaning. Jettisoning old theories of democratic transition and cultural convergence, the research team plans to approach this crucial period in history as an intense confrontation between models and ideas drawn from around the world. Emphasizing the importance of international exchange and circulation, the project will document the emergence of a new form of regional politics that fused pernicious political and cultural ideas imported from the West, local traditions of national supremacy and xenophobia, and collective experiences of political and economic collapse. At the same time, the research team will explore how these new cultural forms have now been packaged and exported abroad, acquiring a visible role in EU and US politics.

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The Anthropology of History

The Anthropology of History

Scholars brought together insights from postcolonial studies, indigenous archaeology, and archaeological anthropology to locate an emerging understanding of how we come to know the past.

Current trends in postcolonial studies, indigenous archaeology, archaeological ethnography, and in the anthropology/history border-zone, indicate the emergence of an as-yet unarticulated new research orientation: the anthropology of history. This project, conceived in collaboration with Charles Stewart (University College London) engaged faculty and visitors in Anthropology, History, Philosophy, and Divinity to synthesize and theorize the comparative ethnographic and historical study of the diverse means by which people gain knowledge of the past. These are matters of concern not only for numerous social science and humanities disciplines, but also for society more generally as the West begins to reflect upon the circumscribed operating sphere of its putatively universal truths and the concrete policy, legal, and cultural implications of acknowledging both non-Western historicizing practices and Western ways of relating to the past that do not conform to the standards or concerns of disciplinary history.

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Becoming Urban: Understanding the Urban Transformation of Migrants to Phnom Penh

A cyclist stands in the street at Central Market in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Becoming Urban: Understanding the Urban Transformation of Migrants to Phnom Penh

Through traditional and distributed ethnographic methods, the research team is exploring the lived experiences of Cambodian migrants from rural villages to urban centers; the factors that drove the decision to migrate; and the changes that result from becoming urban.

This research project seeks to understand the process of becoming urban at a critical time in Cambodian history. Combining traditional and distributed ethnographic methods, the research team will explore and analyze the lived experiences of migrants from rural villages to urban centers; the economic, environmental, and social factors that drove the decision to migrate; and the changing connections to place, space, and people that result from becoming urban. Ultimately, the project aims to produce a deeper understanding of the lived experience of migrants and a better account of their transformation from villagers to urbanites.

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Capturing the Stars: Women’s Networks and the Advancement of Science at Yerkes Observatory, 1895-1940

An astronomer at the Yerkes Observatory telescope, year unknown. Courtesy of the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Capturing the Stars: Women’s Networks and the Advancement of Science at Yerkes Observatory, 1895-1940

This project will reconstruct the scientific work and lived experiences of fifteen women who conducted research at Yerkes Observatory in the early twentieth century. By studying their scientific practices, collaborations, and professional networks, the team will transform our understanding of women’s contributions to astronomy and astrophysics.

Women did science at Yerkes Observatory in the early twentieth century. These women were not merely calculators, assistants, or secretaries. They got degrees, collaborated with peers of both sexes, and worked on papers, albeit ones for which they were rarely listed as authors. (Husbands or deceased men more often received the credit.) But while their lives and labor are all but invisible in public records, their contributions to science – and their voices – remain preserved in archives across the country. The interdisciplinary team on this project will begin reconstructing the scientific work and lived experiences of approximately fifteen women in their own words through new archival research. The team will focus on four topics: (1) women’s networks anchored at women’s colleges; (2) women’s research and contributions to observatory operations; (3) Yerkes’s role as a unique place for women in science; (4) women’s personal and professional relationships with their male colleagues.

Investigating the dynamic ways these women contributed to the advancement of science and their varied experiences as women in science will open a new chapter in the history of astronomy and astrophysics that foregrounds the importance of hitherto invisible labor. It will also contribute to a larger reevaluation of scientific progress, which de-prioritizes the work of so-called great men or exceptional women in favor of a more holistic and inclusive conception of scientific research. Our key question is: In what ways can the study of scientific practices, research collaborations, and professional networks transform our understanding of women’s contributions to astronomy and astrophysics?

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Censorship, Information Control, and Information Revolutions from Printing Press to Internet

Censorship, Information Control, and Information Revolutions from Printing Press to Internet

This project compared current efforts to control information with parallel responses to the print revolution in the early modern world, with the aim of informing policy and keeping the digital world a fertile ground for free expression.

The digital revolution is triggering a wave of new information control efforts, ranging from monopolistic patent laws to the Great Firewall of China. These efforts are sometimes conspicuous, as with the deletion of archives or the arrest of authors, and sometimes subtle, as in the fine-print terms of service contracts that accompany the software downloads that saturate our lives. How are these efforts affecting creativity, innovation, and discourse? How do they endanger the circulation and survival of art and knowledge in the digital age? And how can we craft policies that will simultaneously protect creators, businesses, consumers, artistic freedom, and privacy? This project proposes to answer these questions by leveraging our knowledge of the print revolution after 1450, a moment like our own, when the explosive dissemination of a new information technology triggered a wave of information control efforts. Many of today’s attempts at information control closely parallel early responses to the printing press, so the pre-modern case gives us centuries of data showing how such attempts variously incentivized, discouraged, curated, silenced, commodified, or nurtured art and expression. Examining the digital revolution in light of the print revolution will help us avoid repeating past mistakes, and let us craft information control policies that will make the digital world a fertile space for art and innovation.

A public dialogue series will bring together scholars of print revolutions past and present with practitioners working on the frontiers of today’s information revolution. These events will not be formal panels with presented papers, but freeform discussions in which experts bounce ideas off each other, discovering rich parallels between our work and sharing them in real time. Taking place from October through November, the eight dialogues will unite historians, editors, novelists, poets, and activists, and will be filmed and shared online, to let the public enjoy and continue the discussions.

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The Changing Social and Rhetorical Foundations of Florentine Republicanism

The Changing Social and Rhetorical Foundations of Florentine Republicanism

Art historians and political scientists drew from a uniquely rich dataset of social networks among approximately 60,000 Florentines over the period 1350–1530 to explore the tumultuous political history of Florence.

Throughout history, political factions and conflicts organizationally were assembled out of evolving social, economic and patronage networks. At the same time, those factions and conflicts were expressed and articulated through evolving semantic languages, at the levels of both public and private debate. Building upon an unusual data set of social networks among approximately 60,000 Florentines over two centuries, this Neubauer research project sought to document and explain the tumultuous political history of Florentine republicanism over the period 1350-1530, both from the social-network and from the rhetorical perspectives.

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Climate Change: Disciplinary Challenges to the Humanities and the Social Sciences

Climate Change: Disciplinary Challenges to the Humanities and the Social Sciences

Scholars from across the University convened regularly in a reading group to consider the ways that humanistic inquiry can advance environmental knowledge and improve approaches to climate policy.

The problem of climate change forces us to rethink many of the basic analytical categories in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Within the humanities, writers and artists are experimenting with new ways in which their practices can catalyze environmental awareness, and emerging research is beginning to integrate the history of culture with the history of the earth’s climate.

This project brought together faculty and graduate students from across the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences in a reading group. We were especially interested in the place of the humanities in meeting the challenge of climate change. How might humanistic perspectives inform the science and politics of climate change? We also considered how climate change is transforming our understanding of history, politics, literature, and ethics, inspiring new approaches within the humanities.

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Curses in Context

Curses in Context

This project brought together an international cohort of archaeologists, historians, and philologists for comprehensive study of ancient curses in their local and archaeological context.

Small lead tablets inscribed primarily in Greek or Latin with private curses against rivals or wrongdoers reveal a darker side of ancient life that is often hidden from us in our sources for ancient history. This project aimed at a more intensive and contextualized study of these texts found throughout the Mediterranean basin and beyond. In the past these texts have generally been studied as a unified epigraphic corpus with little emphasis on the local context of their deposit in tombs, sanctuaries, and bodies of water, or on the local features of dialect and paleography. Recently excavated hoards from Greece, Italy, and Roman Germany allow us new opportunities to study these curses as material objects in their specific archeological and historical contexts. This project required a combination of technical skills: restoration, imaging, paleography, archaeology, and historical and religious studies. A series of four international conferences provided a platform for discussing and generating new editions of texts and collected volumes of essays focused on important aspects never considered in the past.

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