Research programme

Global History of Knowledge

Our team is committed to the study of knowledge in its broadest sense, encompassing both ideas and practices in all its historical variety. We look at what people regarded as knowledge, how they created, collected, circulated and used it, also why it mattered to them, and how all this was embedded in political, socio-economic, cultural and religious contexts.

Contact: Bart Verheijen

We are particularly interested in global exchanges and contestations of knowledge, which we study with empirical rigour on the basis of primary sources in their original language (in line with our institute’s motto, “global questions, local sources”). Many of us focus on moments of intensive cross-cultural entanglements (explorations and globalization) and asymmetrical power relations (empires and colonialism) which triggered new, often neglected global networks of ideological resistance (revolutions and peace movements) and religious revivalism (fundamentalism, theosophy).

In doing so, we are a diverse crowd, using approaches that vary from Cambridge-style intellectual history to postcolonial studies to more-than-human history. In everyday practice, this diversity is reflected in our teaching and supervision across a wide range of fields, including intellectual history, history of ideas, cultural history, history of science, technology, and medicine, history of esotericism and the occult, critical heritage studies, history of the humanities, historiography, and historical theory.

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