Onur Erdur is a historian specializing in global intellectual history, the history of knowledge, and contemporary history. He was an assistant professor at HU Berlin from 2017 to 2024 and then held guest professorships in Berlin and Flensburg. His publications include Die epistemologischen Jahre (2018) and Schule des Südens (2024).
About his project:
What Happened in the Nineties? Situating the Humanities
In contemporary history and popular culture, the long 1990s—beginning 1989 and ending 2001—are widely regarded as a transitional decade marked by globalization, technological transformation, and shifting cultural paradigms. This project asks whether such characterizations (and assumptions) also apply to the humanities and how a history of the humanities in the 1990s could be written. Through a series of case studies, it examines how universities and funding structures adapted to post–Cold War realities and embraced interdisciplinarity; how the rise of “identity politics” reframed scholarly discourse; and how emerging digital infrastructures reshaped the intellectual self-conception of the disciplines.