Announcement for the next Global Information History Workshop on the historical cultures of vigilance, featuring a keynote by Arndt Brendecke with responses from Daniel Jütte and Monika Mommertz. The online event will take place on April 30, 2026.
The online symposium „The Cultures of Vigilance: Towards a History of ‚Private‘ Watchfulness“ explores historical practices of attention, surveillance, and knowledge production. The keynote will be delivered by historian Arndt Brendecke (LMU Munich), whose work focuses on the history of knowledge and information in the early modern period. His talk will be followed by responses from Daniel Jütte (NYU) and Monika Mommertz (University of Basel), offering diverse perspectives on the topic. The event takes place on April 30, 2026, via Zoom (please register here).
The Global Information History Workshop is an online peer-seminar and reading group co-organised by Yuval Givon (Jerusalem), Anja-Silvia Goeing (Harvard) and Philippe Bernhard Schmid (Basel). The workshop is co-hosted by the University of Basel, Harvard University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, LMU Munich and the University of Zurich. While the monthly workshop announcement contains a reading list and is generally only distributed to our regular participants, the group organizes a symposium once a year at the end of spring term, which is advertised broadly.