Call: CHSTM History of Language Sciences 2025–26

CHSTM Working group History of the Language Sciences. Meetings online, September 2025–May 2026

Archives scaffold research in both history and the sciences. Far from passive repositories, they assert order and give shape to the world. In the midst of what feels like daily media revolutions, archives have attracted widespread interest from historians of science in recent years. “The archive” has been newly re-conceptualized as a cross-disciplinary focus of reflection and analysis. At the same time, political impulses to de-colonize the archive, alongside the ambitions and anxieties made possible by new media, have motivated highly specific interventions in the discipline of linguistics. From the corpora of computational linguistics to the digitization of resources documenting endangered languages, linguists have reckoned explicitly and enthusiastically with the affordances of their collections.

In the 2025-26 academic year, our working group will explore the relationship between these two traditions of thinking with and about archives. What can a cross-disciplinary perspective bring to bear on the uniqueness of archival practices in linguistics? Reciprocally, how might the particularities of linguistics inform the broader historiographic conversation around archives in the sciences? Do examples of linguistic corpora, for example, resist the notion that archives are inherently historical or not? How might conversations about governance in other fields—botany, for instance—relate to practices in linguistics? We look forward to exploring such questions with interested scholars from any disciplinary background.

We welcome proposals for presentations in the next season of our working group. If you would like to present, please get in contact with Judy Kaplan (jrk@chstm.org), Raúl Aranovich (raranovich@ucdavis.edu) or James McElvenny (james.mcelvenny@mailbox.org). Thanks!