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The Journal for the History of Knowledge, to be launched in 2020, includes an annual special issue, compiled by guest editors, which explores a theme central to its scope.

We are currently accepting proposals for the Fall 2021 Special Issue.

Proposals should contain the following:

• A description of the proposed theme (1500-2000 words) highlighting its significance for the history of knowledge
• A table of contents (typically 8-12 articles, more is negotiable)
• Abstracts of the articles
• Two-page CVs of the editors; short biographiess of the contributors
• An outline of the production process up to manuscript submission. All manuscripts must be submitted to the journal by Summer 2020.

Please send your proposal to all three editors:

Sven Dupré (s.g.m.dupre@uu.nl);
Ilja Nieuwland (ilja.nieuwland@huygens.knaw.nl), and
Geert Somsen (g.somsen@maastrichtuniversity.nl).

Proposal deadline: 16 December 2019
Notification of acceptance: before 29 February 2020

After submission, all manuscripts will go through a process of peer-review, author’s revisions, and copy-editing. JHoK is an Open Access journal, in principle at no charge to the authors.

Details of the journal's scope can be found here

A full list of the editorial team and advisory editorial board is available here.

We are delighted to announce that The History of Bureaucratic Knowledge: Global Comparisons, c. 1200 - c. 1900 has been selected as the inaugural special theme issue of the Journal for the History of Knowledge. Edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen, it will appear in 2020. 

To quote from the proposal:

"This collective publication makes the claim that the history of bureaucracy is, at its core, a history of bureaucratic knowledge. It is therefore best studied with the methods developed to historicize scientific practices. We follow knowledge-making practices as they moved across company headquarters, government bureaus, the study, and the field. In fact, fundamental practices such as writing, calculation, and record-keeping flourished first to administer states before they were used to study nature. The entwined history of science and bureaucracy is increasingly coming into focus, as the history of science continues to broaden into the history of knowledge. Furthermore, colonial historians, anthropologists, and media scholars have come to study the epistemic power of states with approaches that are comparable to those used by historians of science. In short, our volume comes at a critical juncture in the development of disciplines that study knowledge in the past and that make these investigations relevant to current policy concerns.”

Visit the website www.journalhistoryknowledge.org to follow the publication of this issue. We expect that the call for the next special issue, to be published in 2021, will be posted in July.