Temaomtale HIS115

Høsten 2026 tilbys følgende tema:

Tema: Time: A History. 1700-present

Ansvarlig: Marcus Colla

Historians have always been interested in time. After all, time is the historian’s stock in trade; it is the very substance of their subject. In 1943, the French historian Marc Bloch observed that time is the ‘very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible’. He argued that historians ought to distinguish between ‘time as a mere abstraction’ and ‘historical time’, between time as something measured by clocks and calendars and time as something experienced, qualitative, contingent and variable. Time, as Bloch saw it, was not simply something in which history took place – a neutral background against which events played out – but something that history actually produced. 

This course takes up Bloch’s challenge. It interrogates some of the innovative approaches to the history of time that historians of the modern world have developed. Indeed, the course is deliberately designed to be ‘timely’: in recent years, the history of time and temporality has become a flourishing area, even leading some historians to speak of a ‘temporal turn’ in the discipline. Drawing on some of the latest research in the field, the course will explore themes such as ‘The Politics of Time’, ‘Time, Physics, and Philosophy’, ‘Time and Revolution’, ‘Time and the Environment’, ‘Time and Gender’, ‘Time and Colonialism’, ‘Histories of the Future’ and ‘Nostalgia’.  

By exploring these topics, we will seek to answer a number of fundamental questions about the importance of time and temporality in Modern History. What is unique in how modern societies have expressed their relationships to the past and the future? How have experiences of time been shaped by transformations in technology, work, and politics? How has time been used as an instrument of control? How have intellectuals theorised and thought about time? How have scientific discoveries changed our ideas about time? And how can an understanding of time help us analyse some of the most pressing issues of our world today – climate change, geopolitical shifts, political polarisation, and digital culture?