ESHS Symposium proposal 'Hypnotism and the circulation of knowledge in Europe, 1880-1940"
Dear colleagues,
We would like to propose a symposium for next year’s ESHS conference in Lisbon, September 4-6 (http://eshs2014.ciuhct.com/callforpapers.html).
We would like to propose a symposium for next year’s ESHS conference in Lisbon, September 4-6 (http://eshs2014.ciuhct.com/callforpapers.html).
We are still looking for one additional speaker to complete our proposal
on hypnotism and the circulation of knowledge in Europe, 1880-1940.
If you are interested, we would appreciate if you could send us a
message by December 26th. Abstracts are due by January 8th. Also,
feel free to drop us a line if you are interested but have further questions.
Best wishes and apologies for cross-posting!
Andrea Graus & Annette Mülberger (CEHIC, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Heather Wolffram (University of Canterbury), Kaat Wils (University of Leuven) – kaat.wils@arts.kuleuven.be
Best wishes and apologies for cross-posting!
Andrea Graus & Annette Mülberger (CEHIC, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Heather Wolffram (University of Canterbury), Kaat Wils (University of Leuven) – kaat.wils@arts.kuleuven.be
Symposium “Hypnotism and the circulation of knowledge in Europe, 1880-1940”
The history of late 19th and early 20th century hypnotism challenges historians of science. Hypnotism played a constitutive albeit contested role in the formation of disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry and legal medicine, while it was at the same time popular in lay medical therapies and in private and public forms of entertainment. Both as a practice and as an intellectual problem, hypnotism found itself on the margins of what was considered as ‘science’. As a field which never became fully institutionalized or recognized, it was doubly taken in processes of circulation of knowledge, across national and across disciplinary boundaries. In this symposium, the transnational circulation of concepts and practices of hypnotism and the ‘local’ migrations of concepts and meanings between intellectual fields or between ‘science’ and its others will be explored.
In phase with the ongoing internationalization of most scientific disciplines,
the field of hypnotism entered the scene of transnational scientific
communication with the organization in 1889 of the First International
Conference on Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism in Paris. The conference
supported and reinforced existing transnational contacts and controversies
among scholars engaged in the recognition of hypnosis as a legitimate object of
scientific investigation. In a field which had difficulty to establish itself
within traditional, nationally structured institutional settings, similar
transnational initiatives – including journal publications and small scale
initiatives such as individual visits and correspondence between scholars
- may have played specific roles. What was the role, for instance, of
transnational contacts in individual scholars’ search for scientific authority
in locally or nationally defined settings? And did the existence of (informal)
transnational networks of scholars play a role in national debates on the need
to regulate the practice of hypnotism, or on its alleged benefits or dangers?
In a similar vein, questions of authority and expertise were at play in the
interaction between neighboring fields. How were lay practitioners for instance
referred to by scholars who sought to establish hypnosis in a recognized
scientific discipline? What types of contacts between different actors – and
specifically between lay practitioners and recognized scholars or experts
- did actually exist? How were notions of ‘lay’ and ‘expert’ defined in
this process? Were different types of expertise recognized, and did they relate
to each other in a hierarchical way? These and other questions relating to the
circulation of knowledge will be explored in 4 papers dealing with different
geographical and disciplinary contexts.
Kaat Wils
Onderzoeksgroep Cultuurgeschiedenis vanaf 1750
Research
Group Cultural History since 1750
Faculteit Letteren/Faculty of Arts KU Leuven
PB 3307 Blijde Inkomststraat 21
B-3000 Leuven
tel 00 32 16 32 49 71