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Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen

Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen

MA & PhD

 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0976-9521

  • Universitetsvej 1, 42.1

    DK-4000 Roskilde

    Denmark

Personal profile

Research

Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen is a historian of scholarship. His work focuses on the history of the humanities as well as the history of higher education, from the 17th century to today and across the world. 

CV

MA University of Copenhagen (1999), PhD Freie Universität Berlin (2003), and Habilitation Roskilde University (2023). Teaching, research, and visiting postitions at universities and research institutions in Europe, Asia, North and South America, including University of Chicago, Harvard University, École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte i Berlin.

Head of the Science Studies Research Group at Roskilde University. 

Books

Things of the Past: A Modern Yearning (Cambridge University Press, 2025). (Reading sample)

Modern Historiography in the Making: The German Sense of the Past, 1700-1900 (Bloomsbury, 2022). (Reading sample)

(Reviews: Journal of Modern History, Intellectual History Review, Global Intellectual History, International Network for Theory of History, Austrian History Yearbook, History of Humanities, Central European History, Choice, Francia, Historisk Tidsskrift, Journal of the Philosophy of History)

Edited volumes

Humaniora? En spørgende videnskabsteori (Samfundslitteratur, 2020). (Reading sample).

(with Rens Bod), The Classics of the Humanities I: From the Enlightenment to the Digital Age, special issue of History of Humanities, 2019.

(with Martin Mulsow and Helmut Zedelmaier), Christoph August Heumann (1681-1764): Gelehrte Praxis zwischen christlichem Humanismus und Aufklärung (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2017). 

(Reviews: History of Humanities, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Francia, IFB)

Selected papers

"The Humanities in the Vocational University: On the Unity of Teaching and Research," Writing the History of the Humanities: Questions, Themes and Approaches, ed. Herman Paul (Bloomsbury, 2022), 267-285.

"Virtues of History: Exercises, Seminars, and the Emergence of the German Historical Discipline, 1830-1900," History of Universities, 34, 1 (2021), 27-40.

(with Rens Bod) "The Forgotten Curriculum of the Humanities," History of Humanities, 4, 2 (2019), 219-227.

"Scholarship as a Way of Life: Character and Virtue in the Age of Big Humanities", History of Humanities, 1, 2 (2016), 387-397.

"Relics of the Past: Antiquarianism and Archival Authority in Enlightenment Germany," Storia della Storiografia, 68, 2 (2015), 69-81.

"Private Übungen und verkörpertes Wissen: Zur Unterrichtspraxis der Geschichtswissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert," Akademische Wissenskulturen: Praktiken des Lehrens und Forschens vom Mittelalter bis zur Moderne, eds. Martin Kintzinger and Sita Steckel (Schwabe Verlag, 2015), 143-161.

“Inventing the Archive: Testimony and Virtue in Modern Historiography,” History of the Human Sciences, 26, 4 (2013), 8-26.

"The Language of Objects: Christian Jürgensen Thomsen's Science of the Past," Isis, 103, 1 (2012), 24-53.

"Exploring the Republic of Letters: German Travellers in the Dutch Underground, 1690-1720," Scientists and Scholars in the Field: Studies in the History of Fieldwork and Expeditions, eds. Kristian H. Nielsen, Michael Harbsmeier, and Christopher J. Ries (Aarhus University Press, 2012), 101-122.

“Leopold Ranke’s Archival Turn: Location and Evidence in Modern Historiography,” Modern Intellectual History, 5, 3 (2008), 425-453.   (Prize: 2009 Best Article Award of the Forum for History of Human Science).

“Christian Thomasius, Invisible Philosophers, and Education for Enlightenment,” Intellectual History Review, 18, 3 (2008), 319-336.

“Leopold von Ranke, la passion de la critique et le séminaire d’histoire,” Lieux de savoir: Espaces et communautés, ed. Christian Jacob (Albin Michel, 2007), 462-482.

“How Germany left the Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 65, 3 (2004), 421-432.

Keywords

  • History, Society
  • Theory of science, History and sociology of science, knowledge and technology, Research policy
  • Education, Learning, Training
View all 68 research outputs
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