Lecture by Professor David Henkin “Days, Weeks, and the Cultural History of Calendar Time”

 

Date & Time: May 9, 2024; 15:00-16:30

Venue: Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies Main Building 6th floor, Meeting room, Hongō Campus, University of Tokyo
*In-person only

*No registration required

 

Lecture Abstract:

The regime of modern Western timekeeping that has entrenched itself across much of the world over the past two centuries is often classified as “clock time” and understood as emphasizing the precise measurement of formally identical instants or chunks of a continuous linear flow. Whereas premodern and non-Western societies thought of time naturally or cyclically or kairologically (or not at all), the typical accounts argue, modern Western subjects experience time as a homogeneous, measurable domain and modern Western governments formalized the artificial grid that allows for its rationalization and coordination.

But what does the history of modern temporal experience look like If we highlight the calendar, rather than the clock, as a central timekeeping device? Calendars, unlike clocks, introduce heterogeneity (and not just homogeneity) into our mental maps of time. And the history of their use and development between the French Revolution and the First World War suggests a very different story about about the way timekeeping standardized, formalized, and modernized during that period. Mobilizing my research into the experience of the seven-day week in the United States in the nineteenth century as an historical case study in modern calendrical timekeeping, this talk seeks to open up some new ways of thinking about the relationship between modern technologies and temporal consciousness.

 

Bio:

David M. Henkin is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught about society and culture in nineteenth-century America for close to three decades, focusing on the histories of everyday life, popular culture, cities, migration, communications, print, timekeeping, labor, visual culture, and sexuality. He is the author of City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (1998); The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (2006); The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are (2021); and (with Rebecca McLennan) Becoming America: A History for the 21st Century (2015, 2022). His current projects deal with baseball, political partisanship, and the history of the calendar.

https://history.berkeley.edu/david-henkin

 

Language: English

Organized by: Hisano Lab, Supported by ITASIA Program
Inquiries: aihisano”@”iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp (”Please remove double quotes”)