When and why do historians and others reconsider historical questions and methods? Drawing on examples from Europe and the US spanning the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, the analysis considers how the experience of unexpected events has affected the way people understand the trajectory of history and the kind of history they write.
Commentator: Chris Otter, College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History
Speaker
Holly Case, professor of history at Brown University, is a historian of modern Europe whose work focuses on the relationship between foreign policy, social policy, science, and literature in the European state system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during WWII, was published in May 2009. The book shows how the struggle for mastery among Europe’s Great Powers was affected by the perspectives of small states. She also wrote The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond, published in June 2018. The book sets out to explain when and why people started thinking in terms of “questions,” and how it altered their sense of political possibility. Case has written on European history, literature, politics and ideas for various magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, The Chronicle Review, Aeon, The Nation, Dissent, The Times Literary Supplement, Eurozine, Boston Review, and Current History.
About the International History Seminar
If you are interested in attending this semester’s events and joining the International History Seminar, please send an email confirming your interest to the Hayes Chair Graduate Research Associate at hayeschairgra@osu.edu, and you will be included on the mailing list going forward. Materials will only be pre-circulated to people on the mailing list.
Coffee will be served at 3:30pm. The event will start at 4:00pm.