Dr. Michael C. Carhart
Fellow
01.09.09-31.08.10
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS)
School of History
D-79104 Freiburg im Breisgau
CV
Born 1966; 1999 Ph.D., Rutgers University, Field of Study: Early Modern History; 1999-2001 Assistant Director, New Jersey State Legislature Oral History Project; 2004-09 Assistant Professor of History, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia; 2009-present Associate Professor of History, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia; 2009-10 FRIAS Fellowship; 2010 Fellow, American Council for Learned Societies
Publications
MONOGRAPH
- The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Harvard University Press, 2007).
ARTICLES
- "Polynesia and Polygenism: The Scientific Use of Travel Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century,” History of the Human Sciences 22/2 (April 2009), 58-86.
- "Historia Literaria and Cultural History from Mylaeus to Eichhorn” in Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, Peter N. Miller, ed. (University of Toronto Press, 2007), 184-206.
- “Anthropology and Statistik in the Göttingisches Historisches Magazin, 1787-94” in Historians and Ideologues: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Kelley, Anthony T. Grafton and J.H.M. Salmon, eds. (Rochester University Press, 2001), 245-270.
- “Enlightenment, Enlightenments, Decline, and Fall,” Intellectual News 8 (2000), 73-83.
FRIAS Research Project
"The Caucasians: Central Asia in the European Imagination"
Following the eclipse of biblical narrative that placed the origins of humankind in western Asia (Eden, Ararat, Babel), there arose a new scientific narrative of human origins and migrations that employed other means to reach approximately the same conclusion: that humankind first appeared on the slopes of the Caucasus mountains or the steppes of Central Asia. Between 1780 and 1830, three new sciences (anthropology, classical philology, linguistics) converged to confirm the Caucasian hypothesis of human origins. This project reconstructs the founding of those disciplines and the networks of travel and correspondence that linked centers of European science with frontiers of exploration in farthest east Asia and colonies around the globe.
