PEOPLE
Helge Jordheim (PI)
Helge Jordheim is the leader of Lifetimes: A Natural History of the Present. He is Professor of Cultural History, University of Oslo; Professor II of German Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He received his PhD in German literature from the University of Oslo in 2006 for a work on genre and politics in 18-century Germany (Der Staatsroman im Werk Wielands und Jean Pauls, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007). He has published extensively on 18th-century intellectual culture in Europe as well as on conceptual history and philology. His last book is a global history of the concepts of civility and civilization, written with an international team of scholars (Civilizing Emotions, Oxford University Press, 2015). In the last decade he has written several articles, in which he fleshes out different ways of thinking about times in plural, published in journals like History&Theory. At present he is writing a book on the cultural history of time in the 17th and 18th centuries. [HJ]
Espen Ytreberg
Espen Ytreberg is professor of media studies at the Department of media and communication, University of Oslo, and Ph. D coordinator for that university’s Facuty of humanities. He researches the history and temporality of media, particularly mediated events. In 2018-19 he leads (with Helge Jordheim) the project «In Sync: How synchronization and mediation produce collective times, then and now” for the Norwegian Academy of Sciences. [EY]
Anne Kveim Lie
Anne Kveim Lie is an associate professor in the history of medicine at the the Institute for Health and Society, University of Oslo. By background a physician and historian, her main research interest is the history of diseases. In particular, she has been interested in how diseases come into being and pass away, how they have been defined and classified, and how borders between the normal and pathological have been drawn in particular historical periods. Her broader research interests are the history of reproduction and, most recently, the history of antibiotic resistance and the history of microbes. Among her recent publications are “Naming and Classifying Diseases in the Eighteenth Century” in ARV (2016) and (with Scott Podolsky) “Futures and their uses. Antibiotics and Therapeutic Revolutions,” in Jeremy A. Greene; Elizabeth Siegel Watkins & Flurin Condrau (ed.), Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century. University of Chicago Press (2016). [AKL]
Einar Wigen
Einar Wigen is associate professor of Turkish studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. As well as being trained as an Ottomanist, he holds one MA in political science from the University of Oslo, and another in peace and conflict studies from EPU, Austria. He is the author of State of Translation. Turkey in Interlingual Relations (University of Michigan Press, 2018) and co-author (with Iver B. Neumann) of The Steppe Tradition in International Relations: Russians, Turks and European State Building 4000BCE-2017CE(Cambridge University Press, 2018). [EW]
Brita Brenna
Brita Brenna is professor of museology and cultural history. She co-ordinates Centre for Museum Studies and the MA Program in Museology and Cultural Heritage at IKOS, University of Oslo. Her research interests lie at the intersection between museology, material culture studies and the history of knowledge. She wrote her PhD on international exhibitions in the 19th century, her post.doc on natural history in Norway in the 18th century. Technologies for making nature visible is a major interest, from landscape depicitions to glass cases in natural history museums. Her recent project, funded by RCN, has investigated museums as sites for copying, the edited volume Museums as Cultures of Copies is forthcoming with Routledge (2018). [BB]
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor in Global Culture Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. He is the PI of the European Research Council project CoFutures: Pathways to Possible Presents (2020-2024 / ERC 852190) and the NFR project Science Fictionality. He is the Series Editor for Studies in Global Genre Fiction (Routledge), the Editor-in-chief of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research (FINFAR, Finland), and has formerly been editor of the Journal of Science Fiction (MOSF, Washington, D.C.). He primarily works on Science Fiction and has published widely in this area. [BC]
Hugo Reinert
Associate Professor – Cultural History and Museology at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS), University of Oslo. His work to date covers a range of topics, including projects on reindeer pastoralism, climate change, nonhuman extinction and mining. He is currently developing a new line of research on imaginaries of geology, deep time and the underground. [HR]
Leonoor Zuiderveen Borgesius
Leonoor Zuiderveen Borgesius is a doctoral fellow in Cultural History at the University of Oslo where she works on a project about land-reclamation practices and questions of time. She received her MA in Historical Studies from Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands) and is an editor of the journal Roma Aeterna. Her PhD project is part of WP3. [LZB]
Laura op de Beke
Laura op de Beke is a PhD candidate at Oslo university whose project looks at “Anthropocene temporalities” in video games in order to understand a new structure of feeling particular to these times, characterized by a sense of protracted crisis, anxiety over the future, apocalypticism as well as techno-futuristic hope. This structure of feeling emerges from the realization that human history is tangled up with earth history, which anthropogenic climate change makes abundantly clear. Laura’s PhD project is part of WP6.. [LB]
Stine Alling Jacobsen
Stine holds an MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London and is currently doing a PhD at the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo as a part of the project Geological Times: Geology and New Regimes of Historicity. Her project is concerned with the entangled histories and the intertwined scales and temporalities of cryolite mining in Ivittuut in South West Greenland and how the development of geological science about Greenland was/is shaped by the colonial and industrial initiatives of the Danish state. She studies mining maps and geological mapping practices, as well as works with archives, collections and material biographies. Her interests include colonial history, the Anthropocene, spectrality and hauntology and questions of representation and absence in history. [SAJ]
Rana Issa
Rana Issa is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at the American University of Beirut. She specializes in the literary histories of key texts of world and global literature. She has been engaged in research on modern texts such as the Arabic Bible translations, the early Arabic novel, modern lexicography, nineteenth century travelogues to bibleland and the work of translation. She teaches courses in translation, world literature, romanticism and the modern Arabic nahda. She is the co-founder of SPACE (Syria Peace Action Center) and is currently researching the temporalities of dissident Syrian literature and film under Assad rule. Rana has published in the Journal of Semitic Studies, the Journal of Arabic Literature and others. She is the translation editor of Rusted Radishes and the organizer of the lecture series Tarjamat. She has translated theory and literature between Arabic, English and Norwegian. Rana took her PhD at the University of Oslo, and lives between Oslo and Beirut. Prior to taking up her position, she was postdoctoral fellow in the “Synchronizing the World” (2015-17). [RI]
International Partners
Michelle Bastian, Chancellor’s Fellow, Department of Architecture, Edinburgh College of Art. [MB]
Geoffrey C. Bowker, Donald Bren Professor, Department of Informatics + Director of Values in Design Laboratory, UC Irvine [GCB]
Fiona Cameron, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University [FC]
Lucian Hölscher, Professor Emeritus at Ruhr-University Bochum [LHo]
Lynn Hunt, Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California-Los Angeles [LHu]
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and Professor of International Relations in the School of International Science at the American University, Washington, D.C. [PTJ]
Margrit Pernau, Senior Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. [MP]
Clifford Siskin, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English and American Literature and Director of The Re:Enlightenment Project at New York University. [CS]