Kultrans

International workshop (12-13.03.12): What makes a king a king? "Divine right" was long the obvious answer, and the cult of royal glory its major cultural expression. In all its excesses and exuberance this cult is among the cultural practices of the early modern period which is the most alien, most difficult for us to comprehend. Read more.

Workshop, Nature and the natural (30.01.12): The purpose of this workshop is to investigate the rhetoric that reaches beyond the human sphere. If humans are perhaps the only species capable of rhetoric, they are certainly not the only species affected by it. In fact, rhetoric creates the space within which our everyday practices with other beings take place. Rhetoric thus connects the philosophical "question of the animal" with our everyday interactions with animals; in both cases, the salient issue is that – and how – words and other rhetorical means have consequences. Read more

New seminar series (15.02.12): Natural scientists are not the only scholars studying, analysing and writing about nature: So do also scholars within the disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities. But how is this done? How is nature - or different forms of nature-objects - brought into our analyses, in different ways, within our various disciplines and research traditions? Which theoretical, literary and empirical resources are we drawing upon? What are our sources of inspiration and which problems and challenges are we facing and seeking to solve?

Conference, Oslo, September 12-14 2012: Is academia becoming interdisciplinary? Or do disciplines still condition our research and teaching in profound ways? Is disciplinarity perhaps even an inherent operative mode of modern academia? If so, how and to what extent should our institutions provide for interdisciplinarity? Read the call for papers. Deadline: March 15.

Open guest lecture (05.12.11): Sonja Brentjes (University of Seville) is one of the leading scholars in the history of Arabic science. She is one of the very few people doing serious work on the Arabic text of Euclid’s Elements, of which she is currently preparing a critical edition. She will give the following lecture: "The Arabic edition of Euclid's Elements in MS Mumbail, Mulla Firuz, R.I.6 - a serious challenge to the medieval and modern histories of the Elements in Arabic in the ninth century?". Read more.

International workshop (5.-6.12.11): The participants in the Kultrans research project "Textualizing Democracy" will meet to present and discuss chapter drafts for their academic book with focus on investigating the textual processes involved in the creation of the Norwegian Constitution and its various transformations and interpretations during the last two centuries. Programme.

Museological lunch, open seminar (30.11.11): Mary Bouquet is Fellow at University College Utrecht. She will give a lecture on "The Oval Room", the heart of Teylers Museum in Haarlem – the oldest public museum in the Netherlands. This room has been nominated as a candidate for the UNESCO World heritage List. What changes have taken place in the Oval Room? How does the museum re-define what is fit to be seen in the process? Read more.

Mobility - open seminar (24.10.11): Thomas Hylland Eriksen has invited Gavan Titley to talk about public discussions of migration in Europe. Gavan Titley is a Lecturer in Media at the National University of Ireland. His current research interests centre on racism and 'multicultural crisis' in Europe. He recently co-authored, with Alana Lentin, The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age.

PhD course (31.08.11 & 31.10-4.11.11): Invitation to an interdisciplinary PhD course at the University of Oslo with, among others, Quentin Skinner, Carolyn Miller, Barbara Czarniawska and Narve Fulsås: Texts in various forms and genres, documents, written sources, reports, archive materials, whatever we choose to call them, play a major role not only in research on past events, but also in research on contemporary issues. Texts are crucial objects to social scientists as well as to researchers in the humanities.