Call for articles - Special issue on "Heroes and heroisation in science, scholarship and knowledge production" of peer reviewed "helden. heroes. héros. E-journal on cultures of the heroic", volume 2016/01

Extended Deadline for abstracts: 30 June 2015 - Deadline for articles: 01 November 2015

Beiträge auf Deutsch willkommen!

For a special issue on heroes and heroisation in science, scholarship, and knowledge production we invite proposals for articles covering the period from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Texts in German, English and French will be considered for publication.
Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, Alexander von Humboldt and Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein - any imaginary list of western heroes of science present in popular and in scientific cultures today can be extended easily. Yet, when it comes to the heroic, the case of the learned scholar and the scientist seem to present us with a paradox: Science and knowledge are about rationality, objectivity, and facts, while the hero rather evokes attributes like physical strength, violent transgression, and emotions. How is it, then, that the only type of hero which indeed has been venerated over many centuries, and is still venerated today, is the scholar, the scientist or the person to whom we ascribe exceptional capacities with respect to knowledge?

Modern ideas of the scholar or scientist as a hero are based on an extended though often overlooked history that in large parts remains to be explored. The special issue aims both at deepening the debate about this history and at discovering long term connections. Contrary to common modern notions, during many centuries the heroic was closely associated with truth and higher knowledge. From Aristotle and Plato, through early Christian theology, scholasticism, humanist and renaissance thinking, the "labour of the mind" was perceived as a noble and heroic task, open only to the "knowing few" of high social and/or scholarly rank. In the 17th century not only seekers of religious truth, but also natural philosophers reformulated traditional vocabularies and iconologies of the heroic thinker and adapted them for the legitimation, validation and distribution of new ideas and practices of natural inquiry. Narratives, visualisations, and monuments of heroic scientists and/or explorers helped to shape the self-perceptions as well as the self-fashionings of enlightened and educated men and women of the 18th century, while medial transformations of the 18th and 19th centuries led to a proliferation of the representations of personalities deemed as heroic thinkers. And even today the scientist as a hero (or as a mad anti-hero) remains part of the cultural imagination in many parts of the world.

We seek contributions from across different disciplines that proceed along, but are not limited to, the following fields:
- Discourses, ideas and concepts connecting knowledge and/or science (or "scientia") to heroism
- Heroic models and personae as developed by clerical and/or philosophical, scholarly or scientific writers
- Patterns, practices and institutions of heroisation linked to both scientific and non-scientific knowledge production
- Concepts and discourses of nature, the mind, the universe or other fields of knowledge as heroic, or as being linked to the heroic
- Narratives, representations and images of male and/or female scientists, natural philosophers, natural historians, and/or scholars who were venerated as heroes
- The heroic as a means or mechanism to legitimate and validate knowledge claims
- The role of different media, and publics, in shaping and producing the heroic in science and scholarship
- Forms and functions of the heroisation of scientists and scholars during processes of transformation of knowledge production both within learned institutions and in other cultural settings.

The issue aims at contextualising and historicising these and other related phenomena as part of a broader social and cultural history of science and knowledge. It will also ask how forms of heroisation in science and scholarship are inherently gendered or constructed as belonging to specific regions, classes, religions or ethnic groups.
This Call is directed at researchers from all humanities and social sciences. Contributions will be selected based on abstracts of 2000 characters (including spacing) to be submitted together with a short CV.
Please submit until 30 June 2015 to: ejournal@sfb948.uni-freiburg.de. Notifications will be sent by 06 July. Articles based on the selected proposals (no more than 50.000 characters including spaces and footnotes) must be submitted by 01 November, 2015 and will then undergo peer review.
helden. heroes. héros. e-journal on cultures of the heroic.
http://www.helden-heroes-heros.de
Issue editor:
Monika Mommertz, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg i. Brsg/D
Main Editors:
Ulrich Bröckling, Barbara Korte, Birgit Studt