Conference organized by Michael Osman and Cristóbal Amunátegui (University of California, Los Angeles)
In the last few decades, debates stemming from the science and history “wars” have called attention to the ways in which cases are constructed and proven across disciplines. “Cases and Scale in Historiography” will explore the relationship between the case and one of its constitutive elements: scale. Among many other things, cases are a way of managing distance: between the past and the present, the far away and the near, norms and exceptions, ideation and reality. Thus defined, cases are inevitably bound to the shifting measures and temporalities of scale, something which may seem at odds with today’s dominant culture of scholarly specialization. Like magnets, cases have the potential of centripetally attracting different knowledge, sites, and periods in order to solve the problems they pose. To deal with the spatiotemporal vagaries of scale, however, entails facing a wide-ranging set of historiographical and epistemological difficulties: the scalar analysis imposed by cases seems to pit historiographical specificity against both blind specialization and Diogenean erudition. By pointing to the links between scale and the case, then, our invitation is to explore the limits and possibilities of the historian as both expert and generalist.
Please visit the website for the list of speakers and program schedule and register for this event.