Institutionalising Knowledge

Cambridge-Uppsala Online Workshop Series

This seminar series examines how science and scholarship became institutionalised, from the early modern period to the present, with a global scope. It treats 'institutions' broadly: alongside universities, research institutes, and academies, it also takes in understudied spaces of knowledge production such as scientific congresses, religious institutions, and informal but structured knowledge spaces.

It combines empirical study of these institutions with theoretical reflection on institutionalisation as a historical process, including its links to colonialism, imperialism, and state-building, as well as to political liberation and resistance. Institutions serve as a lens on science itself: who takes part and who is excluded, which practices and epistemologies are seen as legitimate or contested, and how science is used by states and economies.

Sessions run online on the second Wednesday of each month during the academic year. The online format is intended to include researchers who cannot easily travel to Cambridge or Uppsala, and the series welcomes both early-career and established scholars presenting work in progress.

Organisers: Maria Florutau (Wenner-Gren Fellow, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge) and Laura Royer (PhD Researcher, Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University)

The seminar is online only. For the Zoom link, please either email Maria Florutau (mif24) or fill out this form.

Michaelmas Term 2026

14 October, 3.00–4.15pm
'You are ignorant like one who has never slept in Siwindhe': grandmotherhood, storytelling and credentialed expertise in Western Kenya, 1850s–1980s
Esther Ginestet (North Carolina State University)

11 November, 3.00–4.15pm
Prize contests as stimuli for knowledge exchange in the long 18th century
Avi Lifschitz (University of Oxford)

2 December, 3.00–4.15pm
Between capital and province: Greek Orthodox intellectual life in Istanbul and Athens at the turn of the 19th century; the Patriarchal Academy of Kuruçeşme and the Philomousos Hetaireia
Nicolas Nicolaides (Centre for Asia Minor Studies)