On September 23, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science welcomed the third cohort of the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) "Knowledge and Its Resources: Historical Reciprocities“! The hybrid event brought together the new and existing students, the IMPRS Teaching Faculty, and MPIWG colleagues for the first time.

After opening remarks by IMPRS Speaker Karin Gludovatz (Freie Universität Berlin), the five incoming doctoral students—Hannah Kressig, Po-Yuan Cheng, Alexander Hall, Lena Kasten, and Annca Pielenhofer—delivered engaging elevator pitches on their research projects.

The event continued with a reception, then a workshop on “Early Modern Resource Knowledge,” led by Sebastian Felten (Vienna). The workshop addressed current scholarly debates on the concept of resources, examined its analytical and political relevance for the history of knowledge and science, and explored its use in the individual dissertation projects pursued by the now seventeen doctoral students at the IMPRS.

List of the dissertation projects

• Hannah Kressig: Becoming Bonobo: On Modeling a Species
• Po-Yuan Cheng: Measuring and Calculating: Lisuan Knowledge During the Qing Dynasty's Anti-Western Policies (1736–1840)
• Alexander Hall: Building a Future in Outer Space: Knowledge Control, Institutional Cultures, and Cold War Imagined Technologies
• Lena Kasten: Of Types and Stones: A Media History of Knowledge on Spatial Deviation
• Annca Pielenhofer: Squeezing Knowledge out of Rocks: The Politics of Paper Squeezes in Nineteenth-Century Sabaean Studies