Current trends in Humanities/Masters’ Academy 13.11.2024 ; 3 p.m.

08 11 2024

The Masters’ School Seminar/ Masters’ Academy will be held on November 13, at  3 p.m.

Our guest is Dr Hans C. Hönes.

DISSOLVING DISCIPLINES? REASSESSING ABY WARBURG’S LEGACY

The German-Jewish art historian Aby Warburg has become one of the most important reference points for a wide range of disciplines in the arts and humanities. In particular, he is lauded for developing a unique interdisciplinary approach to research – what he called Kulturwissenschaft – that ranges programmatically across multiple academic fields such as art history, archaeology, religious studies, media studies, and philology.
In recent years, Warburg’s ideas have found purchase not only among art historians, but also among thinkers who advocate a fundamental reordering of academic research, according to the idea of a transdisciplinary, “problem-based” approach to research. Instead of pursuing our respective disciplinary endeavours in a siloed and particularized way, scholars of all kinds should come together and pool their knowledge, to tackle the most pressing challenges of the contemporary world, from climate change to artificial intelligence.
The lecture takes Warburg’s life and career as a springboard to reflect on the opportunities and challenges of such an approach. What are the gains and losses when proposing to dissolve longstanding disciplinary boundaries?

BIO:

Dr Hans C. Hönes is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Aberdeen/Scotland. He has published extensively on the history of art historiography, and written and edited books on (among others) Heinrich Wölfflin, British antiquarianism, and Aby Warburg. His latest monograph Tangled Paths. A Life of Aby Warburg has been published by Reaktion Books in 2024, with translations into Italian and German forthcoming.