Kristine Palmieri is a historian of science and knowledge in the German and English-speaking worlds after 1700. Her work focuses on the history of philology and language studies, the history of the human sciences, as well as the history of scholarly practices and scientific methods. She also has longstanding interests in the history of European encounters with ‘others’ as well as new interests in the global history of ‘modern’ science and the history of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
As a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge Kristine is currently working on her first monograph, Nurseries of Progress: Classical Philology, Research Seminars, and the Ethos of Science in Germany, 1700-1870. She is also project collaborator for history with the University of Chicago Women's Board funded research project, “Capturing the Stars: Early Twentieth Century Astronomical Astronomy and the Untold History of Women at Yerkes Observatory.” An exhibit in connection with this project, co-curated by Kristine, will open at the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center in September 2023. In 2023–2023, further work for “Capturing the Stars” will be supported by a seed grant from the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.
Kristine’s second project is tentatively called “The Turn to Comparison: A New History of the Human Sciences in German, 1800–1950.” It will investigate how and why comparative methods came to be scientifically important and intellectually powerful in the fields we now call anthropology/ethnology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, and religious studies during the nineteenth century and trace the consequences of this turn to comparison through 1950. Most basically, by paying close attention to the relationship between science, culture, and society, aims to illuminate how comparative research methods transformed German conceptions of humanity from the French Revolution through the Second World War. In so doing, it will also shed new light on how comparative studies contributed to broader discussions about biological race, cultural ethnicity, and national identity, as well as the progress (or decline) of modernity.
