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.

Modern human subjects necessarily operate on three levels of temporality simultaneously: every-day temporality, biographical time (life-time), and the historical age or epoch. In this event, the renowned sociologist Hartmut Rosa will argue that in late-modern society, owing to processes and pressures of acceleration, the three levels of time have become fragmented and disintegrated; temporal resonance has given way to temporal alienation. This leads to individual as well as collective disconnection from past and future generations, and hence to historical anxiety: the feeling that history has stopped moving forward.

Hartmut Rosa is Professor of Sociology at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and Director of the Max-Weber-Kolleg at the Universität Erfurt. He is widely known for his theorization of technico-enconomically induced social acceleration and of social “resonance” as an antidote to alienation. His books in English translation include Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (2015), The Uncontrollability of the World(2020), and Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World(2021). A collection of his essays, Time and World, is forthcoming in May.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmut_Rosa
New Book: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Time+and+World-p-9781509566266

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