Tag: Franz Anton Mesmer

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2 PhD positions in early modern history, 18th and 19th centuries at the University of Friborg, Switzerland

A collaboration involving FactGrid as the project ressource, the following scholarship announcement in French, English and German:

2 postes de doctorant-e en histoire moderne, XVIIIe-XIXe siècles (Université de Fribourg, Suisse)

 Le Département d’histoire de l’Université de Fribourg met en concours deux postes de doctorant-e-s en histoire moderne (4 ans, 100%) à partir du 1er mars 2022. Les postes sont intégrés au projet FNS The Mesmerism in Switzerland: interactions, transnational circles and networks, media / Le mesmérisme en Suisse : interactions, cercles et réseaux transnationaux, médias / Der Mesmerismus in der Schweiz: Interaktionen, transnationale Zirkel und Netzwerke, Media sous la direction de prof. Claire Gantet, financé par le Fonds national Suisse.

1 thèse Le mesmérisme en Suisse occidentale : sociabilités, mobilités, constellations

1 thèse Un flux d’informations : le mesmérisme en Suisse

Les projets se concentrent sur le problème du mesmérisme en tant que nouvelle thérapie très influente élaborée par Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) – découverte de l’hypnose et son utilisation en médecine– et sur les relations entre croyance et science ainsi qu’entre patient et médecin. Ils le font en maniant des perspectives notamment d’histoire culturelle, d’histoire micro-historique et d’histoire transnationale. Les projets de thèse se situent dans le domaine de l’histoire des savoirs et étudieront les pratiques et relations d’interdépendance du mesmérisme. Une cotutelle avec un expert étranger est possible.

 Vos tâches

Vous développerez un projet de recherche indépendant sur le mesmérisme. Au cours de votre thèse, vous aurez l’occasion de participer à des ateliers et à des conférences internationales et d’échanger des idées avec des expert-e-s de votre domaine de recherche. Vos données complèteront les bases de données Harmonia universalis (https://harmoniauniversalis.univ-paris1.fr/#/) et FactGrid (https://database.factgrid.de/wiki/FactGrid:Early_Modern).

 Votre profil

Vous devez être titulaire d’un master en histoire, si possible des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, ou dans un domaine connexe avant le commencement du poste. Vous savez mener une recherche de façon autonome et avez de bonnes capacités de lecture en français, en anglais et en allemand. La thèse peut être rédigée en anglais, en allemand ou en français. Vous devez avoir une adresse en Suisse durant la durée du contrat.

 Ce que nous offrons

Nous vous offrons la possibilité d’effectuer un projet de recherche indépendant en collaboration et en échange avec une équipe motivée. Le département bilingue d’histoire de l’Université de Fribourg vous offrira également un environnement de recherche stimulant. Dans le cadre de la thèse, vous aurez diverses possibilités de supervision et de développement professionnel, notamment la participation à des colloques, ateliers, conférences et publications. Nous offrons un contrat de quatre ans avec un salaire conforme aux taux du FNS pour les doctorant-e-s (environ 47’000 CHF la première année). Des fonds sont disponibles pour des activités de recherche spécifiques telles que des séjours de recherche et la participation à des conférences.

Votre candidature doit comprendre

  • Une lettre de motivation : Veuillez expliquer ce qui vous attire dans ce poste et en quoi vous êtes apte à répondre aux attentes
  • Votre mémoire de Master ou un travail de séminaire important, si possible avec le rapport des examinateurs
  • Un curriculum vitae détaillé
  • Copies de vos certificats et diplômes universitaires avec une liste des cours suivis
  • Noms et adresses électroniques de deux personnes de référence que l’Université de Fribourg pourrait contacter

 Vous pouvez rédiger la lettre de motivation et le CV en allemand, en français ou en anglais, selon votre préférence.

L’Université de Fribourg s’efforce d’assurer une représentation équilibrée des femmes et des hommes. Les candidatures de femmes sont donc explicitement les bienvenues. En tant que signataire de la Déclaration DORA, l’Université de Fribourg attache une grande importance à l’évaluation qualitative des résultats académiques.

Veuillez envoyer votre candidature sous forme d’un document PDF par courriel à prof. Claire Gantet (claire.gantet@unifr.ch) avant le 15 Décembre 2021.

Pour tout renseignement complémentaire, veuillez contacter Claire Gantet : claire.gantetnifr.ch.

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2 PhD positions in early modern history, 18th-19th centuries (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)

The Department of History of the University of Fribourg invites applications for two PhD positions (4 years, 100%) in early modern history. The PhD thesis will be realized in the framework of the FNS project The Mesmerism in Switzerland: interactions, transnational circles and networks, media / Le mesmérisme en Suisse : interactions, cercles et réseaux transnationaux, médias / Der Mesmerismus in der Schweiz: Interaktionen, transnationale Zirkel und Netzwerke, Media directed by Claire Gantet and financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The positions will start on 1 March 2022:

1 PhD thesis: The mesmerism in western Switzerland: sociability, mobility, constellations

1 PhD thesis: An information flow: mesmerism in Switzerland

The project focuses on the problem of Mesmerism as the new and influential method of treatment developed by Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815)–discovery of hypnosis and its use in medicine–and the relationships between knowledge and belief or the physician-patient-relationship. It explores it by intersecting multiple perspectives such as cultural, microhistorical, and transnational history. The advertised PhD projects will be situated in the history of knowledge and explore practices and entanglements of Mesmerism.

Your responsibilities

You will define and conduct your own independent research project on Mesmerism. While writing your dissertation, you will be able to participate in international workshops and conferences with leading experts of the field. Your data will be filed in the databases Harmonia universalis (https://harmoniauniversalis.univ-paris1.fr/#/) and FactGrid (https://database.factgrid.de/wiki/FactGrid:Early_Modern).

Your profile

You hold a master’s degree in History (18th-19th century) or a related field by the time you enter the position. You should be highly motivated to do historical research and have good reading skills in French, English and German. Familiarity with history of medicine or history of Switzerland and paleographical or digital abilities are welcome. The PhD thesis may be written in English, German, or French. For the duration of the contract, residency in Switzerland is required.

What we offer

We offer you the possibility to develop your own research project in collaboration and exchange with a highly motivated team situated in the stimulating research environment of University of Fribourg’s bi-lingual department of history and you benefit from its contacts with international experts. Furthermore, we provide you with opportunities for professional development (participation in conferences and publications, workshops with experts in the field). We offer a four-year employment contract with a salary paid according to the SNSF rates for doctoral students (approximately 47’000 CHF for the first year). Extra funding for research activities such as travel to conferences and stays in research libraries is available.

Your application should include

  • A letter of motivation: Please explain what makes you a suitable candidate for this position and why you are interested in it.
  • Your MA thesis or a significant seminar paper, if possible with the examiners’ report.
  • A full CV.
  • Copies of your university transcripts and diplomas.
  • The names and e-mail addresses of two possible referees whom the University of Fribourg may contact.

The letter of motivation and the CV may be written in German, French, or English, according to the candidate’s preference.

The University of Fribourg strives for a balanced representation of women and men. Applications by women are therefore explicitly welcome. As a signatory of the DORA Declaration, the University of Fribourg attaches importance to a qualitative assessment of academic performance.

Please send your application in one PDF file by e-mail to Claire Gantet (claire.gantet@unifr.ch) until 15 December 2021 at the latest.

For further information, please contact Claire Gantet: claire.gantet@unifr.ch

2 Doktoratsstellen, Geschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Université de Fribourg, Schweiz)

Am Departement für Geschichte der Universität Freiburg sind ab dem 1. März 2022 zwei Doktoratsstellen in frühneuzeitlicher Geschichte (4 Jahre, 100%) zu besetzen. Die Stellen sind Teil des vom Schweizerischen Nationalfonds geförderten Projekts The Mesmerism in Switzerland: interactions, transnational circles and networks, media / Le mesmérisme en Suisse : interactions, cercles et réseaux transnationaux, médias / Der Mesmerismus in der Schweiz: Interaktionen, transnationale Zirkel und Netzwerke, Media unter der Leitung von Prof. Dr. Claire Gantet. Der Zeitpunkt des Stellenantritts ist der 1.3.2022.

1 Dissertation über die Akteure, Geselligkeitsformen, Mobilität und Netzwerke, 1780–1840

1 Dissertation über die Medien des Mesmerismus, 1780–1840

Das Projekt richtet sein Augenmerk auf das Problem des Mesmerismus als von Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) entwickelte neue, maßgebende Behandlungsmethode (Entdeckung der Hypnose und ihre Verwendung in der Medizin) und den Zusammenhang zwischen Glauben und Wissen sowie das Arzt-Patienten-Verhältnis. Dieses wird u.a. aus kultureller, mikrohistorischer und transnationaler Perspektive beleuchtet. Die ausgeschriebenen Dissertationsprojekte sind zudem im Bereich der Wissensgeschichte situiert und werden die Praktiken und Verflechtungen des Mesmerismus untersuchen. Eine Doppelbetreuung (cotutelle) mit einem/einer auswärtigen Experten/Expertin ist möglich.

Ihre Aufgaben

Sie entwickeln ein eigenständiges Forschungsprojekt zum Mesmerismus. Während der Dissertationsphase werden Sie die Gelegenheit haben, an Kolloquien, Workshops und internationalen Konferenzen teilzunehmen und sich mit führenden Expert:innen aus relevanten Forschungsfeldern auszutauschen. Ihre Daten werden die Datenbank Harmonia universalis (https://harmoniauniversalis.univ-paris1.fr/#/) und FactGrid (https://database.factgrid.de/wiki/FactGrid:Early_Modern) ergänzen.

Ihr Profil

Sie sollten spätestens bis zum Zeitpunkt des Stellenantritts im Besitz eines Masterabschlusses in Geschichte der frühen Neuzeit oder der Neuzeit (18.–19. Jht.) oder einem benachbarten Fach sein. Sie sind forschungsorientiert und haben gute Lesekenntnisse in Französisch und Englisch. Linguistische und historische Vorkenntnisse zur damaligen Medizin oder zur Geschichte der Schweiz sowie paläographische oder digitale Fähigkeiten sind sehr willkommen. Die Dissertation kann in Englisch, Deutsch oder Französisch verfasst werden. Für die Dauer des Vertrages müssen Sie in der Schweiz wohnhaft sein.

Was wir bieten

Wir bieten Ihnen die Möglichkeit, ein eigenständiges Forschungsprojekt in Zusammenarbeit und Austausch mit einem motivierten Team zu verfolgen. Das zweisprachige Departement für Geschichte der Universität Freiburg und ihre Vernetzung mit u.a. französischen Spezialisten werden Ihnen darüber hinaus ein stimulierendes Forschungsumfeld bieten. Im Rahmen der Dissertation werden Sie verschiedene Möglichkeiten der fachlichen Begleitung und Entwicklung haben, darunter die Teilnahme an Kolloquien, Workshops, Konferenzen und Publikationen. Wir bieten einen vierjährigen Vertrag mit einem Lohn, der den SNF-Ansätzen für Doktorierende entspricht (ca. 47‘000 CHF im ersten Jahr mit steigendem Gehalt). Gelder für spezielle Forschungsaktivitäten wie Forschungsaufenthalte und Teilnahmen an Konferenzen stehen zur Verfügung.

Ihre Bewerbung sollte enthalten

  • Ein Motivationsschreiben: Bitte erklären Sie, was Sie an der Stelle interessiert und warum Sie dafür geeignet sind.
  • Ihre Masterarbeit oder eine längere Seminararbeit, wenn möglich mit Gutachten.
  • Ein ausführliches Curriculum vitae.
  • Kopien Ihrer universitären Zeugnisse und Diplome inklusive Liste der besuchten Kurse.
  • Namen und Mailadressen von zwei möglichen Referenzpersonen, die die Universität Freiburg kontaktieren kann.

Sie können das Motivationsschreiben und den Lebenslauf je nach Ihren Präferenzen in Deutsch, Französisch oder Englisch verfassen.

Die Universität Freiburg strebt eine ausgeglichene Repräsentation von Frauen und Männern an. Bewerbungen von Frauen sind deshalb explizit willkommen. Als Unterzeichnerin der DORA-Deklaration legt die Universität Freiburg Wert auf eine qualitative Beurteilung von akademischen Leistungen.

Bitte senden Sie Ihre Bewerbung bis zum 15. Dezember 2021 gebündelt in einem PDF-Dokument per Mail an Claire Gantet (claire.gantet@unifr.ch).

Für weitere Informationen kontaktieren Sie bitte Claire Gantet: claire.gantet@unifr.ch

Image: Sven Richard Bergh, Hypnotic Séance 1887 Wikimedia Commons

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Celebrating FactGrid’s Q100000: Conrad Alexandre Gérard

Silently and without any fanfare we have passed the 100,000 mark on FactGrid! The item in question is a person: Conrad Alexandre Gérard. In a way he is the perfect candidate to mark this occasion. FactGrid has been diving into networks obscure and less obscure, and Gerard travels on both sides of this distinction: The first French ambassador to the United States and a person interested in Mesmerism, the world of miraculous cures based on “animal magnetism” in the 1780s. Our project started with the German Illuminati and spread into Freemasonry. In doing so, it broadened its scope to include France and England. Gerard is again a perfect representative of this outlook: born in Masevaux, France, in 1729 he pursued a diplomatic career that brought him to Mannheim and Vienna and eventually to the young United States of America. If our hopes are fulfilled, we will follow in his tracks and extend ourselves westwards and across the Atlantic over the next year.

Conrad Alexandre Gérard, Philadelphia 1779
The 100.000th item was created by Bruno Belhoste who began to fuse the Francophone Harmonia Universalis database into FactGrid from where the Mesmerism of 1780s and 1790s Paris will now radiate outwards and into the network of its French and continental adherents. J.J.C. Bode brought these spheres into exemplary contact on his journey to Paris in the summer of 1787 – in the journey that marked the end of the Illuminati since he subsequently declined to resume his work as the last active secret superior when he returned home later that year. Mesmerising is the right word – a word derived from Franz Anton Mesmer, who will stand in the centre of the exceptional scene that is unfolding here.

FactGrid was established in order to give historical data a wider outreach and deeper impact. It is living up to its promise. We welcome joint ventures between platforms. We love to give data an additional outreach. We hope that we can give data sets wider connections and place them within unexpected and exciting contexts of research; and we hope that we can bring research teams together on this mission. Wikibase is designed to encourage this mission.

Looking back: we grew much faster than expected

Bruno Belhoste’s (and David Armando’s) project will deserve a longer blog post in 2020; it will take him another two or three months to feed all his data into the database and to be able to offer more substantial and significant insights; the present input is just preparing the basic structures one can then begin to interconnect. The 100,000th item is more of an opportunity to look back and to speak about the future as far as we can see it from our current vantage point.

Collective editing on FactGrid started on June 11, 2018. We began with data from the two Illuminati research projects that have dominated the scene since the late 1990s. The Illuminati will remain a construction site as we hope to bring online the entire “Swedish Box” (the core collection of Illuminati documents as amassed by Bode from 1782 until 1789). Berlin’s Lodge “To the Three Globes” and the Privy State Archive in Berlin have given encouraging signs that they would support the digitisation and detailed cataloguing. We will need three years of public funding for a project of these dimensions.

The Wikibase installation also invited local low-level projects that were open to testing and developing this resource. Would the “citizens” of Gotha be able to work on one and the same platform used by scholars in their wider international projects? Gotha’s City Church Archive was willing to bring its catalogue online on FactGrid. Heino Richard of the city’s Genealogy Association began an enormous project and has already transferred about two thirds of the “Pfarrerbuch”, volume one of the former duchy of Gotha’s pastors, into structured database information. The former duchy’s 140 pastorates are the project’s backbone; more than 2000 pastors filled the positions since the Reformation. The database has linked them to their parents, their spouses, their respective families, and Heino Richard is now on his way to add all the children — work which will eventually comprise over 15.000 data sets. Here is a perfect opportunity for scholarly professionals since we are dealing here with a tight network of families marrying among each other for over five centuries. We will add information about the professions to allow the sociological evaluation of these family ties.

The Illuminati allowed for the database to grow and merge with Freemasonry — after all this was what they were doing in the 1780s: infiltrating lodges in the German speaking territories. Hermann Schüttler had already identified members of some 130 lodges. Christian Wirkner brought his dissertation on Göttingen’s two late 18th century lodges into the database with some 800 biographies which inspired Martin Gollasch to widen the scope with his own research on the beginning of German’s student fraternities. We are now beginning to understand how the “Landsmannschaften” and a wider spectrum of quasi masonic organisations which recruited students in the central Protestant university cities, laid the ground on which the early 19th-century “Burschenschaften” emerged in the years of the Napoleonic wars. Martin Gollasch’s data sets are enriched by information about all the smaller, more intimate circles of friends which traveled through these wider organisations as he has been mining contemporary “books of friends”, the “Stammbücher” in which students collected entries from their dearest friends.

Bruno Belhoste’s and David Armando’s Harmonia Universalis data will widen the spectrum. One thing has already happened with this new project: Bruno Belhoste has effectively turned the entire site into a trilingual project: All our properties are now available in German, French and English. The interface is already speaking Russian and Chinese (and more than 100 other languages), so there remains some work to be done.

We would love to turn Magnus Manske’s Reasonator into the standard — multi-lingual — interface for simply viewing FactGrid data; that, however, will need a bit of more work from different sides.

One of the projects is hibernating at the moment: Tim Herb made it possible to quote the entire (Protestant) Bible on FactGrid down to the level of the individual verses. The central idea was here to connect all the people and places mentioned in the Bible and the Quran and thus to transform the Biblical historicity and genealogy into structured information. The project is daunting: Wikibase allows contradicting statements. How would a database fare with the competing chronologies of modern and early modern historians? Our predecessors saw the Bible with its succinct 6000 years of Universal history since the creation of the world as the ultimate historical source. When they made the comparison to the Greek and Roman sources, it seemed to them as if the pagans had nourished blatant mythologies. How would the project develop if it was widened into the Quran? The Bible and Quran project is an open challenge at this point. Being able to quote the Bible down to the level of verses has, in the meantime, the charm of offering concise intertextual connections: We might develop a new focus on “Early Modern Networks of Religious Dissent”. The protagonists of this scene had their favorites among the Biblical Books — Daniel, the Prophets, the Apocalypse. Collecting the references we should be able to see how the Bible was used by competing groups on their respective missions, so there is potential here.

The shadow of history: All the GND’s Masonic lodges on a map. The former German speaking regions are coming back to life. We have to get beyond this map – and our map should have historical layers.

Our work on Freemasonry is ultimately as much of a challenge: We could theoretically invite lodges from all over the world to map their historical membership lists and their institutional networks of affiliations and systems back in time. FactGrid should allow visualisations of the spread of Freemasonry on timelines and maps. We are presently at about 850 lodges mostly in the former German speaking territories thanks to a test input of GND data, and these data are broadly unconnected so far — an invitation to dream of the far bigger project that could explore Freemasonry as part of early modern globalisation.

…and ahead: a year of massive challenges

2019 was still a year of cautious consolidation. We have grown faster than expected but we remained a platform of projects that worked silently side by side and in a spirit of open-minded friendship, interlocking knowledge here and there. All data on FactGrid is so far hand picked in tremendously time-consuming work. The GND-input should change the work flow and it should invite projects to start right in the middle of publicly available knowledge. Ten million data sets of people, organisations and places will create a landscape ripe for immediate cultivation.

A lot of questions are still open in this project: Shall we include the whole GND in order to operate as a complete DNB-filial project? Our initial idea was to restrict FactGrid to the early modern period but even such self-imposed and somewhat arbitrary limitations were open to later revision. 1900 had been the line we would draw back in 2018. Today we are confronted with ideas to open FactGrid for research on the entire range of data harvested at the German National Library. How could we deal with personal information of living people without the National Library centre that is responding to requests to modify these data? The opposite threat is just as crucial: And how will we make sure that the input (no matter where it ends) does not turn FactGrid into an agglomeration of data that only a few SPARQL-specialists will be able to mine and which we can hardly keep fresh and alive on our site?

We will have to generate a wider community. We will have to advertise the project in the wider field of Wikimedia projects in order to attract fans of open knowledge from Wikidata and from the different Wikipedia history projects. We will need technical help during the input and we will need a community that adopts this mass of data and that transforms the massive mound of date into a vibrant intellectual playground.

As FactGrid is not exactly a grass roots project we will have to make sure that historical research, archives and libraries will see us as a resource and as a site of collective work. If you belong to the wider world of historians, librarians and archivists and if you are interested in big data you should feel challenged by a project that will turn public data into a treasure one can now, all of a sudden, revise, enrich and explore with unprecedented freedom.

The project will need a more solid technical basis on this course. We need an interface to meet the wider public: an interface which anyone can handle without SPARQL. The interface should be multilingual and it will look more like the Reasonator than our present Wikidata-style pages, which want to be edited rather than looked at.

So, some quite daunting challenges ahead – but we expect it to be inspiring to confront and eventually master them. The software is incredibly cool. It has been opening doors to us during its first one and a half years and we have every reason to think that it will continue to demonstrate this potential for the next years. Wikibase is on its way to become the software of a wide network of Wikibase instances and we should try to become a research platform in this network.