6th USIAS Fellows Seminar: Notions of the North

Notions of the North in scientific discourse

Joachim Grage and Thomas Mohnike, (USIAS-FRIAS fellows 2013), University of Freiburg and University of Strasbourg.

Academics depicted the North in different ways: the home of liberty, the last wilderness, a refuge of melancholy; or the birthplace of an industrious Germanic warrior culture, opposed to Southern superficiality and laziness. These "imaginative geographies" of the North were related to political contexts and local needs.

In their USIAS-FRIAS project, Joachim Grage and Thomas Mohnike study the history of scientific discourse on the North between 1850 and 1950 in France, in Germany and in Scandinavia. They are developing the first geography of transnational dynamics of scientific knowledge of the North, arriving at more general insights about the role of imaginative language in scientific discourse.

Contact info@usias.nl for more information.