Alexander C . T . Geppert
New York University, Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, NYU Shanghai & Department of History, Faculty Member
Deutsches Museum, Munich, Forschungsinstitut für Technik- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Scholar-in-Residence
Deutsches Museum, Munich, Research Institute for History of Science and Technology, Scholar-in-Residence
I am Associate Professor of History and European Studies, and Global Network Associate Professor at New York University, with a joint appointment at NYU Shanghai and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies in New York City. A historian of modern Europe, my work focuses on the nexus of spatiality, knowledge and transcendence in varying configurations, including outer space, miracles, world's fairs and the theory of historiography.
From 2010 to 2016 I directed the Emmy Noether research group 'The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century' at Freie Universität Berlin. I hold master's degrees from Johns Hopkins University (1995) and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (1997), and a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (2004). I have held long-term fellowships at the University of California in Berkeley (1998–99), the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1999), the German Historical Institutes in London (2000, 2009) and in Paris (2012), the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna (2001–02), the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen (2002–05), at Harvard University (2007–09), the University of Cambridge (2013; 2014), the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC (2014–15), NASA/Society for the History of Technology (2018), NYU Florence (2018) and the Center for Advanced Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (2019). Currently I hold the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC; in 2021–22 I will serve as the Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor in History at the California Institute of Technology and the Huntington Library in Los Angeles.
Recent book publications include 'Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe' (2010; 2013); 'New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century' (2010, co-ed.); 'Wunder: Poetik und Politik des Staunens im 20. Jahrhundert' (2011, co-ed.); 'Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century' (2012; 2018, ed.); 'Obsession der Gegenwart: Zeit im 20. Jahrhundert' (2015, co-ed.); 'Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture After Apollo' (2018, ed.); and 'Militarizing Outer Space: Astroculture, Dystopia and the Cold War' (2020, co-ed.). At present, I am completing a comprehensive cultural history of outer space in the European imagination of the twentieth century, entitled 'The Future in the Stars: Europe, Astroculture and the Age of Space, 1942–1972.' My next book project is a global history of planetization, global astroculture and technoscience since the 1970s.
Address: New York University
Center for European and Mediterranean Studies
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
53 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
USA
From 2010 to 2016 I directed the Emmy Noether research group 'The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century' at Freie Universität Berlin. I hold master's degrees from Johns Hopkins University (1995) and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (1997), and a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (2004). I have held long-term fellowships at the University of California in Berkeley (1998–99), the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1999), the German Historical Institutes in London (2000, 2009) and in Paris (2012), the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna (2001–02), the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen (2002–05), at Harvard University (2007–09), the University of Cambridge (2013; 2014), the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC (2014–15), NASA/Society for the History of Technology (2018), NYU Florence (2018) and the Center for Advanced Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (2019). Currently I hold the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC; in 2021–22 I will serve as the Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor in History at the California Institute of Technology and the Huntington Library in Los Angeles.
Recent book publications include 'Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe' (2010; 2013); 'New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century' (2010, co-ed.); 'Wunder: Poetik und Politik des Staunens im 20. Jahrhundert' (2011, co-ed.); 'Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century' (2012; 2018, ed.); 'Obsession der Gegenwart: Zeit im 20. Jahrhundert' (2015, co-ed.); 'Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture After Apollo' (2018, ed.); and 'Militarizing Outer Space: Astroculture, Dystopia and the Cold War' (2020, co-ed.). At present, I am completing a comprehensive cultural history of outer space in the European imagination of the twentieth century, entitled 'The Future in the Stars: Europe, Astroculture and the Age of Space, 1942–1972.' My next book project is a global history of planetization, global astroculture and technoscience since the 1970s.
Address: New York University
Center for European and Mediterranean Studies
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
53 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
USA
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Volumes I and II were published in spring 2018, volume III in winter 2021.
"All three volumes are highly recommended to those interested in how space exploration has affected culture and vice versa. I expect astroculture to grow in importance, both as a cultural phenomenon and as an area of study."
– Steven J. Dick, Former NASA Chief Historian and Library of Congress Baruch S. Blumberg Chair
"This ambitious publication program opens up new vistas in the cultural history of the Space Age, moving outward from accounts that prioritize the rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union."
– De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Science Fiction Studies
"Without question, astrocultural investigation is one of the more interesting and original efforts to restructure spaceflight history in the early twentyfirst century."
– Roger D. Launius, Technology and Culture
Zeit ist eine Obsession der Gegenwart, für deren Vorgeschichte sich die Geschichtswissenschaft erst in jüngster Zeit zu interessieren beginnt. Die neun Beiträge dieses Sonderheftes kombinieren zwei komplementäre Perspektiven zur Historisierung der Zeit des 20. Jahrhunderts: Einmal untersuchen sie anhand historischer Fallstudien aus Deutschland, England, Spanien und Japan das konzeptionelle Nachdenken über Funktion, Rolle und Bedeutung von Zeit in einer Ära neuen Zeitwissens, massiver Zeitbrüche und einander schnell ablösender Zeitregime. Zum anderen analysieren sie Genese und Wandel von Zeitwissen, Zeitpraktiken und Zeitordnungen im Kontext politischer und sozialer Machtbeziehungen. Durchgängig betonen die Beiträge die Pluritemporalität des 20. Jahrhunderts, fragen nach den historischen Entstehungsbedingungen der digital generierten Gleichzeitigkeiten unserer Gegenwart und unterziehen populäre Deutungsmuster wie dasjenige einer weltweiten Standardisierung von Zeit oder ihrer unaufhaltsamen Beschleunigung einer kritischen Überprüfung. Das Sonderheft lotet die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Historisierung von ›Zeit‹ im vergangenen Jahrhundert als grundlegender Kategorie historischen Denkens aus und versteht sich als Baustein einer neuen ›Zeit-Geschichte‹.
Andrea Giuntini: La mobilità in mostra: i trasporti e le comunicazioni nelle esposizioni della seconda rivoluzione industriale
Paolo Brenni: Dal Crystal Palace al Palais de l’Optique: la scienza alle esposizioni universali, 1851-1900
Angela Schwarz: Transfers transatlantici tra le esposizioni universali,1851-1940
Luigi Tomassini: Immagini delle esposizioni universali nelle grandi riviste illustrate europee del XIX secolo
Ursula Lehmkuhl: Una mietitrice come catalizzatore: la Great Exhibition del 1851 e la costruzione sociale della relazione speciale anglo-americana
Anna Pellegrino: “Il gran dimenticato”: lavoro, tecnologia e progresso nelle relazioni degli “operai” fiorentini all’Esposizione di Milano del 1906
Vanessa Ogle: La colonizzazione del tempo: rappresentazioni delle colonie francesi alle esposizioni universali di Parigi del 1889 e del 1900
Maddalena Carli: Ri/produrre l’Africa romana: i padiglioni italiani all’Exposition coloniale internationale, Paris 1931
Andreas R. Hofmann: Utopie nazionali: grandi esposizioni nell’Europa centro-orientale, 1891-1929
Tammy Lau: Le promesse e i rischi di Internet nel regno delle esposizioni universali"
Thomas Laqueur: Cemeteries and the Decline of the Occult: From Ghosts to Memory in the Modern Age
Diethard Sawicki: Spiritismus und das Okkulte in Deutschland, 1880-1930
Albert Kümmel und Justyna Steckiewicz: Leipzig 1877: Medienepistemologische Zugänge zu Karl Friedrich Zöllners Experimenten mit Henry Slade
Logie Barrow: Plebeian Spiritualism: Some Ambiguities of England's Reformation, Enlightenment and Urbanisation
Helmut Zander: Theosophische Orte: Über Versuche, ein Geheimnis zu wahren und öffentlich zu wirken
Peter Mulacz im Gespräch mit Manfred Omahna und Ulrike Spring: Rationalisierung des Außersinnlichen? Zur Wissenschaftlichkeit der Parapsychologie
Pierre Nora: L'ego-histoire est-elle possible?
John Brewer: New Ways in History, or, Talking About My Generation
Antonis Liakos: History Writing as the Return of the Repressed
Barbara Taylor: Heroic Families and Utopian Histories
Leonid Borodkin: From Science to History: Ego-history in the Context of Transition Society
Barbara Duden: A Historian's "Biology": On the Traces of the Body in a Technogenic World
Gareth Stedman Jones: History and Theory: An English Story
Lutz Niethammer: Living Memory and Historical Practice: A Personal Tale
Alexander C.T. Geppert: Historians and (Auto)Biography: A Select Bibliography
La Grande-Bretagne lança la mode en 1851 : les quelque 140 expositions géantes qui se tiennent avant 1914 contribuent à la fois au rétrécissement du monde et au renforcement du prestige des puissances invitantes.
IInternationale, certainement. » Voilà ce qu'aurait répondu le prince Albert lorsqu'on lui demanda, en juin 1849, comment il concevait l'exposition prévue à Londres. Que l'anecdote soit vraie ou non, l'exposition, elle, fut bel et bien internationale. Avec ses 19 000 pièces présentées dans le monumental Crystal Palace (un bâtiment de 560 mètres de long, tout de verre et de métal, conçu pour l'occasion par l'architecte sir Joseph Paxton et aujourd'hui détruit) et ses quelque 6 millions de visiteurs flânant dans Hyde Park de mai à octobre 1851, la Grande Exposition des oeuvres de l'industrie de toutes les nations (Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations) f ...
Volumes I and II were published in spring 2018, volume III in winter 2021.
"All three volumes are highly recommended to those interested in how space exploration has affected culture and vice versa. I expect astroculture to grow in importance, both as a cultural phenomenon and as an area of study."
– Steven J. Dick, Former NASA Chief Historian and Library of Congress Baruch S. Blumberg Chair
"This ambitious publication program opens up new vistas in the cultural history of the Space Age, moving outward from accounts that prioritize the rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union."
– De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Science Fiction Studies
"Without question, astrocultural investigation is one of the more interesting and original efforts to restructure spaceflight history in the early twentyfirst century."
– Roger D. Launius, Technology and Culture
Zeit ist eine Obsession der Gegenwart, für deren Vorgeschichte sich die Geschichtswissenschaft erst in jüngster Zeit zu interessieren beginnt. Die neun Beiträge dieses Sonderheftes kombinieren zwei komplementäre Perspektiven zur Historisierung der Zeit des 20. Jahrhunderts: Einmal untersuchen sie anhand historischer Fallstudien aus Deutschland, England, Spanien und Japan das konzeptionelle Nachdenken über Funktion, Rolle und Bedeutung von Zeit in einer Ära neuen Zeitwissens, massiver Zeitbrüche und einander schnell ablösender Zeitregime. Zum anderen analysieren sie Genese und Wandel von Zeitwissen, Zeitpraktiken und Zeitordnungen im Kontext politischer und sozialer Machtbeziehungen. Durchgängig betonen die Beiträge die Pluritemporalität des 20. Jahrhunderts, fragen nach den historischen Entstehungsbedingungen der digital generierten Gleichzeitigkeiten unserer Gegenwart und unterziehen populäre Deutungsmuster wie dasjenige einer weltweiten Standardisierung von Zeit oder ihrer unaufhaltsamen Beschleunigung einer kritischen Überprüfung. Das Sonderheft lotet die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Historisierung von ›Zeit‹ im vergangenen Jahrhundert als grundlegender Kategorie historischen Denkens aus und versteht sich als Baustein einer neuen ›Zeit-Geschichte‹.
Andrea Giuntini: La mobilità in mostra: i trasporti e le comunicazioni nelle esposizioni della seconda rivoluzione industriale
Paolo Brenni: Dal Crystal Palace al Palais de l’Optique: la scienza alle esposizioni universali, 1851-1900
Angela Schwarz: Transfers transatlantici tra le esposizioni universali,1851-1940
Luigi Tomassini: Immagini delle esposizioni universali nelle grandi riviste illustrate europee del XIX secolo
Ursula Lehmkuhl: Una mietitrice come catalizzatore: la Great Exhibition del 1851 e la costruzione sociale della relazione speciale anglo-americana
Anna Pellegrino: “Il gran dimenticato”: lavoro, tecnologia e progresso nelle relazioni degli “operai” fiorentini all’Esposizione di Milano del 1906
Vanessa Ogle: La colonizzazione del tempo: rappresentazioni delle colonie francesi alle esposizioni universali di Parigi del 1889 e del 1900
Maddalena Carli: Ri/produrre l’Africa romana: i padiglioni italiani all’Exposition coloniale internationale, Paris 1931
Andreas R. Hofmann: Utopie nazionali: grandi esposizioni nell’Europa centro-orientale, 1891-1929
Tammy Lau: Le promesse e i rischi di Internet nel regno delle esposizioni universali"
Thomas Laqueur: Cemeteries and the Decline of the Occult: From Ghosts to Memory in the Modern Age
Diethard Sawicki: Spiritismus und das Okkulte in Deutschland, 1880-1930
Albert Kümmel und Justyna Steckiewicz: Leipzig 1877: Medienepistemologische Zugänge zu Karl Friedrich Zöllners Experimenten mit Henry Slade
Logie Barrow: Plebeian Spiritualism: Some Ambiguities of England's Reformation, Enlightenment and Urbanisation
Helmut Zander: Theosophische Orte: Über Versuche, ein Geheimnis zu wahren und öffentlich zu wirken
Peter Mulacz im Gespräch mit Manfred Omahna und Ulrike Spring: Rationalisierung des Außersinnlichen? Zur Wissenschaftlichkeit der Parapsychologie
Pierre Nora: L'ego-histoire est-elle possible?
John Brewer: New Ways in History, or, Talking About My Generation
Antonis Liakos: History Writing as the Return of the Repressed
Barbara Taylor: Heroic Families and Utopian Histories
Leonid Borodkin: From Science to History: Ego-history in the Context of Transition Society
Barbara Duden: A Historian's "Biology": On the Traces of the Body in a Technogenic World
Gareth Stedman Jones: History and Theory: An English Story
Lutz Niethammer: Living Memory and Historical Practice: A Personal Tale
Alexander C.T. Geppert: Historians and (Auto)Biography: A Select Bibliography
La Grande-Bretagne lança la mode en 1851 : les quelque 140 expositions géantes qui se tiennent avant 1914 contribuent à la fois au rétrécissement du monde et au renforcement du prestige des puissances invitantes.
IInternationale, certainement. » Voilà ce qu'aurait répondu le prince Albert lorsqu'on lui demanda, en juin 1849, comment il concevait l'exposition prévue à Londres. Que l'anecdote soit vraie ou non, l'exposition, elle, fut bel et bien internationale. Avec ses 19 000 pièces présentées dans le monumental Crystal Palace (un bâtiment de 560 mètres de long, tout de verre et de métal, conçu pour l'occasion par l'architecte sir Joseph Paxton et aujourd'hui détruit) et ses quelque 6 millions de visiteurs flânant dans Hyde Park de mai à octobre 1851, la Grande Exposition des oeuvres de l'industrie de toutes les nations (Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations) f ...
Diesen und anderen Praktiken widmet sich die geplante Konferenz "geschichten: die Produktion historischen Wissens", die von Donnerstag, 27. März, bis Samstag, 29. März 2025, am Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (ZiF) der Universität Bielefeld stattfindet.
All NYU Space Talks are held on Zoom. Everybody is welcome but advance registration is required. For further details and to RSVP, please consult https://www.space-talks.com.
All NYU Space Talks are held on Zoom. Everybody is welcome but advance registration is required. For further details and to RSVP, please consult https://www.space-talks.com.
All NYU Space Talks are held on Zoom. Everybody is welcome but advance registration is required. For further details and to RSVP, please consult https://www.space-talks.com.
In the past decade, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have begun to realize that the exploration of outer space was much more than a technoscientific and geopolitical enterprise. Rather, it was also an endeavour prepared and accompanied, deliberated and critiqued by a wide array of intellectuals ranging from Hannah Arendt, Hans Blumenberg and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to Carl Schmitt, Marshall McLuhan and Jean-François Lyotard. Weighing postwar world orders, environmental consciousness, cosmic solitude and human futures from an extra-terrestrial perspective, these philosophers contributed to the planetization of Earth through the thinking of space.
Held at NYU Berlin, the three-day conference Thinking Outer Space focuses on twentieth-century philosophy, astroculture and space thought. At the same time, it recognizes that contemporary understandings of outer space have also been shaped by legal agreements, state institutions and vast bodies of popular science. Aiming to globalize the study of astroculture, the conference transcends the intellectual boundaries of the major space-faring nations. As such, it seeks to engage with the rich and heterogenous cosmologies found in non-western, postcolonial and indigenous contexts.
At present, successive waves of geopolitical competition and commercial speculation are putting outer space back at the center of worldwide attention. State and corporate plans for returning to the Moon and colonizing Mars are capturing the public imagination and budgets alike, while the threat of military confrontation and environmental destruction beyond Earth is ever-expanding. How philosophers and public intellectuals from a variety of disciplinary, political and cultural backgrounds conceptualized and communicated outer space is crucial to comprehending what some have been quick to label the rise of a ‘new’ or ‘second’ Space Age.
Examining the intellectual and ethical foundations of present-day planetarity, Thinking Outer Space brings together historians, geographers, anthropologists, ethnographers, literary scholars, political scientists, scholars of religion and sociologists. Over the course of three days and across nine chronologically and thematically arranged panels, thirty participants from a dozen countries will debate topics ranging from the so-called planetary turn, nineteenth-century protoplanetarianism and cosmic philosophies to the making of space law, narratives and poetics of planetization, and planetary ethnographies.
Advance registration is required. Ironic as it sounds, space is limited and participation can, alas, not be guaranteed. Accepted participants will be informed by email ahead of time.
NYU Berlin
Berlin, 19–21 July 2023
Convenors: Alexander C.T. Geppert (New York University/NYU Shanghai) and Rory Rowan (Trinity College Dublin)
Deadline for proposals: Wednesday, 15 March 2023
Participants will be informed by: Monday, 3 April 2023
www.thinking-outer-space.com
In the past decade, historians, humanists and social scientists have begun to realize that the exploration of outer space was much more than a technoscientific enterprise. Rather, it was also prepared and accompanied, critiqued and opposed by a wide array of intellectuals from Hannah Arendt, Hans Blumenberg and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to Carl Schmitt, Marshall McLuhan and Jean-François Lyotard. Weighing postwar world orders, environmental consciousness, cosmic solitude and human futures from an extra-terrestrial perspective, these philosophers contributed to the planetization of Earth through the thinking of space.
How we understand our diverse relationships to outer space is of vital importance today when it has become the site of new waves of geopolitical competition and commercial speculation. State and corporate plans for colonizing the Moon and Mars have captured the public imagination and budgets alike, while the threat of military confrontation and environmental destruction beyond Earth is rapidly expanding. Examining how philosophers and thinkers from a variety of intellectual traditions conceived, comprehended and communicated outer space is crucial to contextualizing the so-called ‘new’ Space Age. The endeavor will help to understand the intellectual and ethical foundations for contemporary interest in planetarity and what some believe to be a dawning Second Space Age.
Held at NYU Berlin, Thinking Outer Space will be a mid-size interdisciplinary conference with a maximum of twenty participants. This will be in-person event without an online option. We invite proposals for twenty-minute presentations that engage the work of key thinkers and intellectual movements as well as the production, dissemination and consumption of debates around outer space and extraterrestrialism. While the conference focuses primarily on the sphere of twentieth-century philosophy and related disciplines, we recognize that space thought also took shape in other domains such as literature, social movements, government institutions, and think tanks. We are particularly interested in intellectual engagements with astroculture from outside the major space-faring nations and non-western contexts.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words together with a brief CV by Wednesday, 15 March 2023, to convenors Alexander Geppert (alexander.geppert@nyu.edu) and Rory Rowan (rowanro@tcd.ie).
Selected participants will be informed by Monday, 3 April 2023. A small number of travel and accommodation grants are available for those without access to research funds; preference will be given to graduate students and early-career scholars.
All NYU Space Talks are held on Zoom. Everybody is welcome but advance registration is required. For further details and to RSVP, please consult https://www.space-talks.com.
All NYU Space Talks are held on Zoom. Everybody is welcome but advance registration is required. For further details and to RSVP, please consult space-talks.com.
All NYU Space Talks are held on Zoom. Everybody is welcome but advance registration is required. For details and to RSVP, please consult www.space-talks.com
All NYU Space Talks are held on Zoom. Everybody is welcome but advance registration is required. For details and to RSVP, please consult www.space-talks.com
Everybody is welcome. Advance registration is required. For further details and to RSVP, please consult space-talks.com.
Over the course of the twentieth century, outer space has developed into a predominant site of utopian thought and futuristic expansion scenarios. Arguing that space transformed into a place where competing visions of the future were projected, posited and played out by experts and the public alike, the final conference of the Emmy Noether Research Group “The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century” at Freie Universität Berlin will examine the rise and fall of the European Space Age from the interwar years through the Post-Apollo period.
Featuring presentations by group members and invited guests, the symposium pursues a double aim. As the project's closing event, it will take stock of individual and collective contributions to the concerted historicization of outer space undertaken since the group's establishment in 2010. It will evaluate to what extent 'astroculture' as a concept, research agenda and a new field of historical research has been successfully integrated into mainstream twentieth-century historiography. Addressing political, cultural, technological and transcendental aspects of space thought and spaceflight, the symposium also examines the existence and potential characteristics of a particularly West-European variant of the global Space Age. Focusing on the role outer space played in the making of the past century's polymorphic and protean futures, it will discuss the transformation of these past planetary futures into today's planetized present.
Conference speakers include Paul Ceruzzi (Washington, DC), Martin Collins (Washington, DC), Martina Heßler (Hamburg), Dirk van Laak (Gießen), Michael Neufeld (Washington, DC), Helmuth Trischler (Munich) and Helmut Zander (Fribourg).
UFOs sind kein rein amerikanisches Phänomen. Bereits die erste Sichtungswelle im Sommer 1947 schwappte auch nach Europa über und führte zu kaum weniger aufgeregten Reaktionen als in ihrem Ursprungsland. Binnen kurzem entwickelte sich eine eigene Bewegung, die sich der Erforschung dieser „Fliegenden Untertassen“ verschrieb. Aufgeschreckt durch die Entwicklung der Atombombe, fürchtete man alsbald, die Erde stünde nun unter permanenter Beobachtung durch intelligente Wesen von einem fremden Planeten. Mit der UFO-Diskussion begann eine längerfristige Entwicklung, an deren Ende populäre Vorstellungen von der Existenz extraterrestrischen Lebens und naturwissenschaftlich informierte Positionen kaum mehr etwas gemein hatten, erstere sich aber als weit wirkmächtiger erwiesen. Trotz seines massenhaften Auftritts hat sich die akademische Wissenschaft bislang schwer getan mit einem kaum greifbaren Phänomen, dessen Realität stets angezweifelt wurde, dessen Bedeutung als integraler Bestandteil europäischer Astrokultur und des Space Age indes kaum von der Hand zu weisen ist.
Aus unterschiedlichen disziplinären Perspektiven lotet der Workshop die Möglichkeiten und Probleme einer Historisierung der Fliegenden Untertassen als einer zentralen Wissenschaftsfiktion des 20. Jahrhunderts aus. Im Vordergrund stehen Fragen nach dem Verhältnis von Fiktion und Faktum, der Bedeutung und Rolle von Experten und unterschiedlichen Evidenzformen für die Herstellung von Glaubwürdigkeit sowie der Klassifizierung der Ufologie im Spannungsfeld von Parawissenschaft und Quasi-Religion. Schließlich steht das Argument auf dem Prüfstand, dass die akademische Tabuisierung dieses „modernen Mythus“ (C. G. Jung) als Ausdruck der Angst vor einer potentiellen Erschütterung unseres anthropo- und geozentrischen Weltbildes zu begreifen ist.
Probing this intellectual history of outer space and the concurrent process through which the world was turned into a planet was the focus of the recent conference Thinking Outer Space: Philosophy, Astroculture and the Histories of Planetarity, organized by Alexander Geppert (New York/Shanghai) and Rory Rowan (Dublin) held at NYU Berlin from 19 to 21 July 2023. Through nine thematically-organized and chronologically arranged panels, 45 participants from all over the world examined the notion of planetarity — the thinking of Earth as a planet — from numerous historical lineages and philosophical contexts. The conference also facilitated exchange across disciplines, bringing together historians, geographers, anthropologists, literary scholars, political scientists, and scholars of religion and sociologists. The goal, as Geppert and Rowan pointed out, was to collectively develop a “canon” of space thinking across intellectual traditions, and understand how space history and astroculture contributes to contemporary discussions around planetarity.
peace and transcendence? Was the exceptional relevance of space a mere consequence of a fundamental political and cultural shift towards the ColdWar since the mid-twentieth century? Or did outer space as such also react to basic political, social and cultural developments in an age of nuclear threat and increased yearning for security? Covering the period from the 1940s to the
end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the conference „Embattled Heavens: The Militarization of Space in Science, Fiction, and Politics,“ organized by the Emmy Noether Research Group „The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century“ of Freie Universität Berlin, set out to address these questions.
Der Bandbreite an Themen entspricht die Vielfalt der Formate. Monographien, Anthologien und Übersetzungen herausragender fremdsprachiger Arbeiten umfassen das gesamte Spektrum kulturhistorischen Schaffens.
Die Manuskripte werden einem wissenschaftlichen Begutachtungsverfahren (Peer Review) durch die HerausgeberInnen und externe ExpertInnen unterzogen.
Die Reihe wird herausgegeben von Peter Becker, Alexander C.T. Geppert, Martin H. Geyer und Maren Möhring.
Der Weltraumexperte Alexander Geppert hält den im Juni veröffentlichten Bericht des Pentagons über Unidentified Flying Objects (Ufos) für wenig spannend. Es stehe kaum Neues darin.
Die US-Daten zu den Ufos sind nicht öffentlich zugänglich, während in Großbritannien eine Behörde die Ufo-Berichte von Bürgerinnen und Bürgern gesammelt und zugänglich gemacht hat. Aber mehr Daten würden in dem Bereich nicht unbedingt für mehr Klarheit sorgen, so Alexander Geppert.