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The Time of the Antechamber: A History of Waiting, 1500–1800
October 23, 2020 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
This virtual event is organized by the NC German Studies Seminar and Workshop Series. For the most updated details and information on joining the event, please visit the NCGSWS website.
Speaker: HELMUT PUFF I Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Collegiate Professor of History and Germanic Languages, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
While exploring the epistemological difficulties in studying time, the philosopher Henri Bergson cautioned his readers in 1888 that, “We necessarily express ourselves by means of words and we usually think in terms of space.” This observation notwithstanding, recent years have seen an unprecedented spate of studies on temporalities in history, anthropology, sociology, and related disciplines. Evidently, time as a category has never been absent from historical studies. Still, what distinguishes recent studies from previous scholarship? How does time in its different registers and rhythms structure societies? How do temporal modes structure politics, cultures, societies, and social interactions? This talk will seek to survey the historiography on times, temporalities, and temporizations with a particular eye to the history of waiting as a socially mandated and politically meaningful temporal mode in social interactions.
HELMUT PUFF is the Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Collegiate Professor of History and Germanic Languages, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His teaching and research focus on German literature, history, and culture in the medieval and early modern periods. His most recent books are the monograph Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History (2014), and the edited volume After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with and Beyond Foucault (2012). Recently, he has started a new project on waiting as a mode of experienced temporality between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century.
Comment: JAKOB NORBERG I Duke University, Department of German Studies
Moderation: TERENCE V. MCINTOSH I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of German Studies, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History and Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures