Microhistories seminar, AHO

Evidence, clues and trifles: Microhistories seminar

ACT#6: OCCAS/Arch Institute Higher Seminar, AHO fall 2024

Microhistory is key to the Provenance Projected: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity project. In a series of three reading seminars, we will present and discuss some foundational microhistory contributions, a few more recent texts with microhistorical implications, as well as a 1951 detective novel. The seminar will highlight methodological, theoretical and historiographical aspects of a five-decade academic tradition, and its relevance for the writing of contemporary architectural history.

September 10

Intro: Mari Lending

Tim Anstey: Carlo Ginzburg, “Preface to the Italian Edition”, in The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller [1976], trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).

Mari Lending: Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method” [“Crisi della ragione”, 1979], History Workshop Journal, vol. 9, no.1 (spring 1980).

Jørgen Tandberg: Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, “The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historiographical Marketplace”, in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe,

ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, trans. Eren Branch (Johns Hopkins UPress, 1991).

September 24

Ingrid Dobloug Roede: Ben Kafka, «The Disciplined State», chapter 1 in The Demon of Writing. Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: Zone Books, 2012).

Thomas McQuillan: Daniel Arasse, “Paint it Black” in Take a Closer Look [On n’y voir rien: Descriptions, 2000], trans. Alyson Waters (Princeton University Press, 2013).

Simon Mitchell: On the concept Oligopticon

Bruno Latour and Emilie Hernant, Paris: Invisible City [1998], trans. Liz Carey-Libbrecht (virtual book online, 2006).

Albena Yaneva, “Invisible Cities”, chapter 7 in Latour for Architects (Routledge, 2022).

October 8

Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (London: Peter Davies, 1951).