Agenda

On November 16, 2022 Seàn Williams will presents 'Anecdotes, Presentism, and Public Humanities: Historical and Theoretical Reflections on Practice'. The seminar is part of the seminars series organized by the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH), Department of Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. It will be held in person and online.

The seminar reflects on presentism and historicism from both theoretical and practical points of view. I do so through an examination of anecdotes – the modern sense and use of which shifted in the late eighteenth century. In particular, I shall draw from my current interest on Johann Winckelmann’s murder in Trieste, in 1768, and retellings of his fate from his own time into today’s 'true crime' craze. But what is presentism? The biggest challenge facing historical topics within languages and literatures – not only in my native UK, but also across Europe and the US – is the prioritization of contemporary concerns by students, universities strategies, and the public. Why do we increasingly understand or even value the past through this perspective of the present? There are many reasons, but provocatively I suggest that hard-line historicism in the academy has played its part in entrenching the prevalence of presentism that questions the relevance of our academic disciplines to today. Ironically, such mainstream public perceptions are themselves implicitly historicist: we conceive of the present world as distinct, and so different from the past that understanding the latter becomes interesting, not 'necessary'. In turn, that means that a questioning historicism must form part of our response – or rather, that historicism and presentism have a dialectical relationship to one another. 

Away from abstract debate and in the real world, activities that can be called the 'public humanities' or 'public history' attempt to speak to people in the here and now, but – to change the metaphor – also show them “the long view”. Key to engaged practice in the face of presentism, especially in media programming, has been the anecdote. Yet precisely the anecdote has been invoked, rhetorically and methodologically, within theoretical historiography as well. On an academic level as much as in media practice, then, I argue for a soft (or protean) rather than a hard conception of presentism and historicism alike. Indeed, presentism and historicism, or public humanities and academic research, can somehow productively become one and the same.

Seán Williams is Senior Lecturer in German and European Cultural History in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sheffield. Before lecturing at Sheffield, he taught German and comparative literature at the University of Bern in Switzerland; he has held visiting fellowships the Universities of Basel, Switzerland, and Oslo, Norway; he has had research positions at the University of California at Berkeley, USA, and the Hegel-Archiv of the University of Bochum, Germany.  He defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford in 2014.

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