Current Issue

We are pleased to announce the selection of upcoming special issue Knowledge: A Matter of Time, with guest editors Hansun Hsiung, Laetitia Lenel, and Anna-Maria Meister. It is scheduled to appear in the summer of 2023.

The abstract of the special issue:

Wherever knowledge is at issue, there is temporal unevenness at play, and by extension the need for acts of negotiation: epistemic objects, inquiring subjects, and the research projects through which they come together are in the end temporary suspensions and synchronizations of superimposed times. Our special issue, “Knowledge: A Matter of Time,” analyzes instances of investigation, creation, and sense-making as assemblages of interwoven and competing tempos, rhythms, and timescales. Here, nineteenth-century classical philologists and twentieth-century animal behavior researchers find themselves sharing similar strategies for the management of long-term research, coordinating between quotidian schedules, bureaucratic funding deadlines, obsolescing evidence, and generational passings.

Looking at temporal plurality not in the abstract, but as deposited in the materials, methods, instruments, and institutions of a variety of practitioners at work, allows us to discern the connections and parallels between seemingly disparate disciplines and fields of knowledge: natural scientists, social scientists, and humanists alike all grapple with the multiplicities of time embedded in knowing. Taking such a perspective also enables us to rethink fundamental categories which have structured the historian’s discourse on time. Our special issue’s goal, then, is to refract conversations about knowing what and knowing how through the lens of knowing when (and for how long), interrogating the ways in which shifts in timing and temporal perspective bring new kinds of objects before knowers and new kinds of knowers before objects.

The Journal for the History of Knowledge includes an annual special issue, compiled by guest editors, which explores a theme central to the journal’s scope.

We are currently accepting proposals for the Summer 2023 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 of 8000 words)
• Abstracts of the articles
• Two-page CVs of the editors; short biographies of the contributors
• An outline of the production process up to manuscript submission. All manuscripts must be submitted to the journal by early summer 2022.

Please send your proposal to all three editors:
Sven Dupré (s.g.m.dupre@uu.nl),
Renée Schilling (renee.schilling@huygens.knaw.nl), and
Geert Somsen (g.somsen@maastrichtuniversity.nl).

Proposal deadline: 30 June 2021
Notification of acceptance: by 30 September 2021

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 and a full list of the editorial team and advisory editorial board is available on the journal's website.