War and Knowledge Lab 

Summary

Fall 2019 launch

The War and Knowledge Lab explores the ways in which major human sciences—psychology, psychoanalysis, cybernetics, anthropology, etc.—were crucially transformed by the shifting conceptions and practices of warfare between 1910-1955. It focuses on WWI, interwar France, Germany and Britain, WWII, anti-colonial revolutions taking place during this period, and the beginning of the Cold War. The lab engages recent historiographical and methodological innovations (the advent of a new international history, indigenous studies and Native American history, intellectual, legal and economic history), and disciplines that have been largely absent from historiographical or social-science-oriented approaches to war—including literature and aesthetics—and their attention to representation, memory, and trauma. By re-framing the overall picture around a war/knowledge axis, the lab asks: How did major human sciences transform as a result of their entanglement with concepts of war and conflict between 1910 and 1955? And: In what ways might attempts at a new periodization and a more comprehensive understanding of conceptions of war and its role in social and political transformation open up a new field of inquiry? In addition to exploring historically how war has been coupled with knowledge, the War and Knowledge H-Lab takes a rapid-response approach to current events, offering intellectual engagements far broader in scope than would be possible for any one individual to provide.

Lab Team

• Madison Bastress
  Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, Arts and Science
• Stefanos Geroulanos
  Professor, Department of History, Arts and Science
• Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Associate Professor, Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Arts and Science
• Elizabeth Ellis
  Assistant Professor, Department of History, Arts and Science
• Lauren Kirk
  Doctoral Candidate, Institute of French Studies / Department of History, Arts and Science
• Jonas Knatz
  Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, Arts and Science
• Alexander Langstaff
  Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, Arts and Science
• Emily Stewart Long
  Adjunct Instructor, Department of History, Arts and Science
• Matyas Mervey
  Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, Arts and Science
• Marcela Prieto Rudolphy
  Doctoral Candidate, NYU School of Law
• Anne Schult
  Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, Arts and Science
• Jennifer Trowbridge
  Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Arts and Science