Ideas of 'Race' in the History of the Humanities

This volume is concerned with the hitherto neglected role of the humanities in the histories of the idea of race. Its aim is to begin to fill in this significant lacuna. If, in the decades following World War II and the Holocaust - years that witnessed European decolonization and the African-American civil rights movement - the concept of 'race' slowly but surely lost its legitimacy as a cultural, political and scientific category, for much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century concepts of race enjoyed widespread currency in numerous fields of knowledge such as the history of art, history, musicology, or philosophy. Bringing together some of the most distinguished scholars in their respective fields, this is the first collective attempt to address the history of notions of race in the humanities as a whole.

Amos Morris-Reich is Professor in the Department of Jewish History and Thought and Director of Bucerius Institute for the Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa, Israel. Past publications include The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science (2008) and Race and Photography: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876-1980 (2016).

Dirk Rupnow is Professor at, and Head of, the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Previous publications include Judenforschung im Dritten Reich: Wissenschaft zwischen Politik, Propaganda und Ideologie (2011) and Vernichten und Erinnern: Spuren nationalsozialistischer Gedächtnispolitik (2005) and co-edited (with I. Roebling-Grau) 'Holocaust'-Fiktion: Kunst jenseits der Authentizität (2015) and (together with V. Lipphardt, J. Thiel and C. Wessely) Pseudowissenschaft. Konzeptionen von Nichtwissenschaftlichkeit in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte (2008).