MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | JUSTICE AND JUDGMENT
MONDAY, OCTOBER 28 | 6 p.m. | DANIEL FAMILY COMMONS | USDAN UNIVERSITY CENTER
PROFESSOR DEMTRIUS EUDELL
Wesleyan University
This presentation examines the proto-racial discourse that emerged in the historical writing of scholars often identified as having helped to institutionalize the discipline of history. It is therefore situated at the intersection of two currents of the Spätaufklärung, the late 18th-century German Enlightenment; and with particular reference to these phenomena as they unfolded at Gottingen University. The anthropological research of Johann Blumenbach (1752–1840), which was seminal to the founding of the modern discourse of race, coincided at Gottingen with the laying of the groundwork for a disciplinary matrix of historical writing, at what was then being established as the modern research university. Consequently, this presentation explores the foundation of the relation between what subsequently becomes professionalized historical studies with what later becomes a fully-articulated “scientific” discourse on race.
