History of Ideas at Stockholm University is a subject situated at the crossroads of several research fields in the humanities. However, our research is rooted in an interest in historicization.
We explore ideas, discourses, expressions or experiences in the past, which must be understood on their own historical terms. We open phenomena taken for granted, e.g. time, health, political ideologies, human-animal relations, ethnicity, media or public culture, to historical scrutiny and understanding. The study of the history of ideas excavates mental or material structures of thought and action that may have become invisible but are nevertheless active. Therefore, historicization, for us, can also mean a history of the present – tracing the roots and sources of contemporary beliefs in order to raise critical questions about the present. We investigate the past, sometimes in terms of its otherness from the present, sometimes as a vector to understanding how it speaks to us.
Historians of Ideas in Stockholm conduct research in several thematic fields: History of political ideas; History of philosophy; Cultural history; Media history; History of knowledge and Environmental history and Human-animal studies within the field of Environmental Humanities.
Methodologically, many of our scholars are concerned with discursive and meaning-making material. We share, in various ways, the analytical humanistic impulse that words, language, images and symbols intervene in and move the world. While texts are central, many scholars are also interested in materiality beyond language: places, clinics, clothes or animals.
History of Ideas is distinguished from other disciplines in the Department of Culture and Aesthetics by not having an aesthetics and empirical object – art, literature or music – at the core of our research. Instead, source materials range from daily newspapers and bone-dry protocols to government investigations, philosophical writings or historical images.
Research in the history of ideas is therefore interdisciplinary: all researchers in the subject have collaborations with a wide range of scholars in humanities and social science disciplines within and outside Stockholm University. Our research is situated in different research fields – rather than disciplines – that have been shaped around scholarly questions and problems.
