Johan Östling - Humboldt and the Modern German University

Johan Östling - Humboldt and the Modern German University

Johan Östling. Wedensday, May 26th, 2021, 18:00-19:00

This lecture is about the idea of the university in modern Germany. The key issue is how the Humboldtian tradition was transformed and gave direction to the debates. Drawing on recent studies that have shown that the Humboldtian tradition was an invention of the late 19th century, Östling investigates in what ways Humboldt’s ideas have been appropriated for various purposes in different historical contexts and epochs. His presentation concentrates on three significant periods of reform: the immediate postwar period in the late 1940s; the Federal Republic in the 1960s; and the Bologna Process in the 2000s.

Johan Östling is a historian and Wallenberg Academy Fellow at the Department of History, Lund University. He is the director of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK). Östling’s research encompasses various aspects of modern European history, in particular, the history of knowledge, intellectual history, and the history of the university. His recent publications include Humboldt and the modern German University (2018), Circulation of Knowledge (2018), Forms of Knowledge (2020), and Histories of Knowledge in Postwar Scandinavia (2020).