[spsp-members] Joint Commission Online Colloquium in HPS: Session on Time with Elena Aronova

[Pulkkinen, Karoliina J via spsp-members]

Dear all,

On behalf of the Joint Commission of DHST/DLMPST, I am pleased to announce that our next session will be with Elena Aronova. The session will take place on Tuesday, 31 March, 16:30 (BST, UTC +1, London time), 8:30 (PDT UTC-7, California time).

Elena is Associate Professor at the Department of History in University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War<https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo77931413.html> (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and co-editor of the recent Handbook of the Historiography of the Earth and Environmental Sciences <https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-031-40799-4> <https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-031-40799-4> (Springer, 2025). Considering the theme of our colloquium, also her 2011<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11212-011-9146-y> article on Soviet science studies comes highly recommended.

Title. “The Historian and the Physicist: Lucien Febvre, Albert Einstein, and the Debates about Time and Causality at the Centre international de synthèse”

Abstract. In his “meditation” on the occasion of Albert Einstein’s death, Lucien Febvre, the founder of one of the most important schools of historiography of the twentieth century, mused on a number of reasons the historians should familiarize themselves with Einsteinian theory of relativity and try to stay abreast with the implications of “new physics.” Writing at the height of the Cold War, the seventy-seven-year-old historian warned new generation of historians that the stagnation of the historians’ mental tools could lead, if not addressed, to nothing less than the ruin of modern civilization, the very subject to which he devoted his illustrious scholarly career and his teaching. Febvre, however, did not elaborate on the ramifications, direct or indirect, of Einsteinian physics for the historians’ craft that he treated as no more and no less than a question of survival. This paper recovers the specific context of Febvre’s encounter with Albert Einstein’s ideas: the series of interdisciplinary seminars he co-organized in the aftermath of Einstein’s visit to Paris in 1929 at the Centre international de synthèse in Paris. Febvre’s involvement in the Center’s “weeks of synthesis” in 1930 and 1931, as a co-organizer of both “weeks” and as a presenter in the latter, along with the comments he left on both events in his correspondence, gives an opportunity to place his “meditations” into historical context, and to explore the impact of Einstein’s ideas on the historian’s thinking about time as a framework for history, and about historical causation through time.

To access the Zoom link, please complete the following form: https://forms.gle/GTsbXxv3msJiijxo8

Best wishes,
Karoliina Pulkkinen

Dr Karoliina Pulkkinen<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4pkXDY4AAAAJ&hl=en>
Postdoctoral researcher
Aleksanteri Institute
University of Helsinki
https://www.karoliina-pulkkinen.com/

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