New Working Group

With this entry, I am pleased to announce the launch of a new working group dedicated to exploring the history of the language sciences. The group will be hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Presentations in our inaugural year will focus on the theme of “epistemic transfer” in an effort to highlight historical interactions between the language sciences and other knowledge traditions. This thematic orientation will tie in with concurrent programming supported by the Society for the History of the Humanities in 2023.

Meetings will take place on the second Tuesday of each month via Zoom for 60-90 minutes. The conveners hope this will provide a forum where those with historical interests in all manner of linguistic research can come together to share work in progress, engage in “slow reading,” and build community through discussion. We encourage anyone interested to sign up for membership and to join us as soon as the 12th of September!

For this first meeting, we are inviting participants to bring an object of relevant interest for show-and-tell. We hope that these objects will facilitate introductions and, ideally, frame the theme of epistemic transfer. To inform our discussion and analysis of these objects, we ask everyone to please read the essay "History of Science and History of Philologies" by Lorraine Daston and Glenn Most before coming to the meeting. Looking forward!