Helga Nowotny
Title: “Do we need more Wissenschaft? What the sciences and scholarship can learn from each other”
Abstract: While the Near East has often been epitomized as the cradle of urbanism, with countless early urban sites, and urbanization in the Bronze and Iron Ages a well-developed field of study, urbanism as an ontological category pertaining to later, especially the Hellenistic and Roman periods is surprisingly limited. While single monuments, religious architecture, public buildings or certain aspects of elite material culture of Near Eastern cities have been studied in detail, holistic approaches to the life of ancient cities have rarely been undertaken, despite a string of grand narratives about Roman period sites, exactly with an emphasis on their Roman character and more recently with focus on their non-Roman traits. Publications that address urbanism in the Roman Near East have been primarily concerned with the detection of common or comparative features in the often monumental cityscapes. This presentation introduces new research on the historiography of urban archaeology in the MENA region and aims to shed light on the archaeological activities and practices from 1869 to 1946 (the Late Ottoman period until the end of the Mandate period) by re-examining archival and photographic materials along with archaeological and historical publications. Such an investigation seeks to uncover how current urban archaeological approaches and methodologies have been, often unknowingly, shaped by the paradigms established during this earlier period.
Helga Nowotny is Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich; In 2006 she became a Founding Member of the European Research Council and served as President from March 2010 until December 2013. Helga Nowotny received a doctorate in law at the University of Vienna and a PhD in sociology at Columbia University, New York. She has held teaching and research positions in at the Institute of Advanced Study in Vienna, King’s College, Cambridge, UK, the University of Bielefeld, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Collegium Budapest IAS and was Professor of STS at the University of Vienna before moving to ETH Zurich. She continues to be actively engaged in research and innovation policy at national, European and international level. She was Vice-President of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings and Visiting Professor at NTU, Singapore. Currently, she is member of the Board of the Falling Walls Foundation, Berlin, of the Austrian Council for Sciences, Technology, and Innovation and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Together with Saadi Lahlou she directs a research project on societal transition in the domain of food, funded by the NOMIS Foundation. Helga Nowotny has published widely in the field of Science and Technology Studies, on social time, curiosity and innovation. Her latest book ‘In AI We Trust’ was published in 2021 by Polity Press and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Chinese and German. She has received numerous awards, including the rarely awarded Gold Medal of the Academia Europaea, the Leibniz-Medaille of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the British Academy President’s Medal. She is an honorary member of several European Academies of Science and holds more than ten honorary doctorates, including from the University of Oxford and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
Affiliation: Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich
