Martin Herrnstadt is a historian of science and knowledge with a focus on the history of the humanities and social sciences from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. His work contributes to a historical-political epistemology of the human sciences that does not treat power as external to knowledge production. Within this political history of science, he examines the enquête as an interventionoriented form of knowledge employed by state administrations, private actors, and social movements alike.
At KWI, he will further develop his current book project on the history of the monographic method as a transnational tradition of applied environmental and social knowledge that emerged in the mining sciences of the 1830s and 1840s. The project proposes an alternative genealogy of the social and human sciences beyond the reference to a fixed divide between nature and culture. In addition, he is preparing a research proposal that will situate the monographic format within a broader historical framework and integrate its colonial and postcolonial dimensions.
Beyond his engagement at KWI, Martin Herrnstadt co-coordinates the international DFG research network “Global Cultures of Enquête: Towards a Praxeology of Surveying, 17th– 21st Centuries,” (enquete-cultures.org) an interdisciplinary forum that brings together historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars from STS to discuss the political history and contemporary practices of empirical procedures across different regions and periods.