Between 1956 and 1964, in Calcutta, India, at least seven young children with congenital hemoglobinopathies, perhaps more, were injected with various strains of malaria to test their possible immunity. Some of the children were tested on repeatedly. The experiments exposed the already sick children to additional risks and suffering. Strikingly, these experiments started less than a decade after decolonization and were conducted by Indian doctors, rather than colonial doctors. In this article I argue that such tragic practices can only be understood with reference to a set of entangled temporal ..read more

Afterword to the Journal for the History of Knowledge 2023 special issue "Entangled Temporalities ..read more

Testimonies of Holocaust survivors have had an essential influence on public engagement with the Shoah in recent decades. Given this importance, the imminent end of the “era of the witness” has sparked fears that the history of the Holocaust could soon be forgotten. The past decades have therefore seen unprecedented efforts to record the testimonies of Holocaust survivors in order to safeguard the immediacy of their accounts. In this essay, I trace how different temporal entanglements have affected the narrated memory of Holocaust survivors and thus also shaped the knowledge of those born lat ..read more

The “Million Milestone” chart found on the website of The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is a timeline of the eleven million patents that the office has granted since 1836: a visual depiction of patenting as accelarion and speed. With the chart as the backdrop, the narrative focus of this essay is on the third marker on the timeline, patent 3 million, granted to Kenneth R. Eldredge for “Automatic Reading System” on September 12,1961. Two overlapping lines of inquiry are pursued. First, looking behind the chart in order to locate the history of patent three million as it happ ..read more

Time was a problem in medieval South Asia. It was – among other things – a medical problem that philosophers and physicians set out to solve. The complexities of medical practice – which entailed considering an almost infinite set of variables and combinations – meant that no normal person could possibly derive the principles of medicine in a single lifetime. There was too much to know and too little time. This meant that medical practitioners had to rely on the words of other people to carry out their cures. Practicing medicine depended on trusting the proper authorities. This article follows ..read more

The more than 400,000 cubic-meters of concrete meant to contain the deadly debris of the largest nuclear accident of the 20th century in Chernobyl in the Ukraine were named “Sarcophagus” in the Western world— an architectural term describing the stone enclosure of a dead body. It would not remain the only structure built to contain the catastrophic fallout. After 1986, the supposedly ever-durable material of modern architecture started to crumble under the radiation. A new enclosure needed to take shape. In an international architecture competition held in 1992 by the Ukrainian government, an ..read more

The life cycle of periodical cicadas, like the scientists who have studied them, is characterized by periods of long waiting punctuated with spectacular bouts of activity. In remarkable synchrony, every thirteen or seventeen years—depending on the species and the locatio —billions of nymphs crawl from the ground and embark on a relatively short adult life span of three to four weeks. This paper traces three pulses in the scientific study of periodical cicadas, as researchers sought to determine the geographical range of the broods, the number and biological identity of the species found in eac ..read more

The history of the research library represents a series of negotiations over the spatio-temporalities of knowledge. This article focuses on debates over the nature and organization of university research libraries triggered by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot’s 1902 proposal to partition “living” and “dead” books based on usage statistics, relocating “dead” books to offsite storage inaccessible for browsing. I use the Eliot debate to explore attempts to reconcile shifting ideals, institutions, and practices of research itself at the dawn of the twentieth century. Two intertwined ideals lie a ..read more

This article implicates the question of what a scholar is with the question of when a scholar is: that is, how a scholar is positioned in time. The act of such positioning—“timing”—involves a wide array of negotiations: it embraces everything from the way a scholarly investigator construes their temporal relationship to their object, to the way they countenance past and future investigators, to the rapidity with which they write. And of course, it demands the efforts of other people. Using the case of the eighteenth-century Göttingen professor Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761), this piece exp ..read more

This essay brings to light the intersectionality of Time, Religion and Identity, and the complex relationship with Time and temporality that the history of Islam in China displays. The deeply embedded temporality in Islamic praxis produced expertise in time-making that secured Chinese-Muslims an important place in Chinese society and polity. At the same time, an anxiety arising from the negative effects of the passing of Time prompted Chinese Muslim scholars to come up with methods to negotiate Past, Present and Future and new articulations of Time. This essay focuses on four articulations of ..read more