Reflections on the Festschrift / Memorial Volume: A Review of Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger. (original) (raw)

Commemorative Practices in the Humanities around 1900

Around 1900, the humanities underwent a metamorphosis which led to the emergence of modern disciplines. This transformation was accompanied by another process, the building of scientific communities. The central question addressed in this essay was how these new disciplinary communities in the humanities were strengthened by commemorative practices. Those practices could be highly diverse, ranging from the dedication of a book and the circulation and collection of photographs to the organisation of tribute events, attending of funerals and writing of obituaries. The forms that these practices could take were mapped out in this essay using material drawn from the archives of three prominent (literary) historians from Belgium and the Netherlands: Paul Fredericq, Robert Fruin and Jan te Winkel.

The Adventures and Misadventures of a Festschrift

1969

It is no small secret to scholars across the disciplines that the festschrift is a dying enterprise. Increasingly, trade presses are following university presses in setting strict policies against them, which makes the appearance of The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory: Essays in Honor of Martin Jay, edited by five of Jay’s former students (Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn, and Elliot Neaman) all the more surprising. The Modernist Imagination commits the expected cardinal sins of the festschrift. The essays are, at times, a bit self-gratifying and too indebted to the critical methodologies and theoretical lenses of the scholar they attempt to praise. They also often fail to engage the work of Jay critically in ways that others who were not bound to produce an essay in his honor might, and, like many a festschrift before it, this one fails to find cohesion and unity, or speak a direct critical narrative. But for all of its we...

"The Afterlives of Scholarship: Warburg and Cassirer," History of Humanities, 2 (2017) 1: 245-270 (DOI: 10.1086/690581).

History of Humanities, 2017

One of the unresolved riddles in the history of the humanities is the relationship between Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer, or, more precisely, the impact of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg on Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. In engaging with this particular constellation I lay out a model of what I call epistemic surroundings and how they facilitate scholarly production in the humanities. Therefore, this article sets out to describe the labor of humanists in terms of an historical epistemology. In short, this is an essay in understanding humanist scholarship in the making and its afterlives as plastic knowledge in inevitable motion.

Biographic and bibliographic recollections re: collections and contributions

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the role played by collecting in a productive academic career. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology is autobiographic and bibliographic recollections about the collecting of advertising books, notes, advertisements, documents and ephemera. Findings – Collecting facilitated diverse forms of activities and academic contributions: many scholarly papers, archives, illustrated presentations, museum displays, documentary films, art gallery shows, theatrical productions, governmental reports, CDs, DVDs, web sites, and much involvement in litigation and regulatory hearings. Research limitations – The scale and variety of results may be limited to domains with a clear public interest and contemporary regulatory activity. Originality/value – The paper offers a unique demonstration of the potential for antiquarian interests and hobbies to be of academic value and public interest.