The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society is sponsoring a workshop on neurohistory to be held in Munich in June. Broadly speaking, they are calling for papers to engage the following theme: “How can neuroscience help us understand the past?”
This interest follows Daniel Lord Smail‘s book of 2008, On deep history and the brain, which asked questions about when “history” ought to be conceived as having begun and also appealed to the brain as a way to reach behind the texts that typically inform historical research. This new workshop follows his lead:
- What ideas and methods have neuroscientists developed that historians can use to shed a new light on the past (and vice versa)?
- What new research questions can neuroscience suggest for historians (and vice versa)?
- What are the biggest challenges in developing neurohistory as a field, and how can they be overcome?
- How might neurohistory shed light on the interaction between people and their environment, in both the past and the present?
For those interested, the organizers are asking for participants to pre-circulate a short (1000 word) position paper, participate in a two-day workshop (6-7 June 2011), and then revise their paper for publication (in Rachel Carson Center Perspectives).
We seek proposals from scholars from any discipline with expertise in history, neuroscience, or environmental studies. Experience working at the intersection of neuroscience with history or environmental studies is welcome, but not required. One of our goals is to stimulate interest among scholars who may not have thought about these intersections before. While we expect to focus on the four questions above, we will also consider proposals that pose creative new questions.
Airfare, accommodation, and meals will be provided for the 8-10 selected contributors. The proposal deadline is 28 February 2011.
The proposal consists of a cover letter and a CV. The cover letter should, in no more than two pages, describe the contributor’s background, research interests, and paper idea. We ask contributors to both pose the question his/her paper addresses, and to propose a way to answer it. Send the cover letter and CV to Andrea Jungbauer as email attachments (andrea.jungbauer@carsoncenter.lmu.de) or by mail to the Rachel Carson Center. (Leopoldstrasse 11a, 80802 Munich, Germany).
See also at AHP: