We live in a time of acute historical anxiety. This anxiety manifests itself in various forms: ambivalence about our relationship to the past, a disorientating sense of ever-accelerating change, the fear of an unpredictable and uncontrollable future. How we conceive historical time is an essential component of the human effort to order and control lived reality. Historical anxiety occurs when established understandings of time no longer seem adequate to actual historical developments. This series will explore historical anxiety in the present and how it impacts our understanding of the past and future.

Uncertainty, disorientation, and insecurity are the words most often used to describe the current conjuncture in our historical understanding. It is a double temporal disorientation provoked, on the one hand, by what François Hartog has called “presentism”, and on the other, by the unprecedented temporalities of the Anthropocene. In this event, François Hartog will address some fundamental questions arising from this disorientation: How do we deal with the conflicts between the times of the world and planet time? Doesn’t entering a new cosmos call for a new history: a cosmo-history?

François Hartog is best known for formulating the concept of “regimes of historicity” (ways that the past, present, and future are conceived in relation to one another). He is Professor Emeritus of Historiography at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Among his honours are the Légion d’Honneur (2013) and the Grand prix Gobert of the Académie Française (2021). His books in English translation include Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (2015) and Chronos: The West Confronts Time (2022). His most recent book is Départager l’humanité: Humains, humanismes, inhumains (2024).

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Hartog

Nicholas Halmi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford and Margaret Candfield Fellow of University College, Oxford. His current research is concerned with historical consciousness and historicization in the aesthetic realm, and with cultural periodization and the concept of Romanticism. Among his publications is The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (2007). He is completing a book called Historization, Aesthetics, and the Past.

Website: https://nicholashalmi.org
Homepage: https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-nicholas-halmi