July 8-9, 2027 | Workshop | University of Erfurt 

The concept of virtue has become an important analytical tool within the History of Science. Scholars employing this concept have shifted their focus from scientific ideas themselves to the practices involved in cultivating the “epistemic virtues” that made the emergence of these ideas possible. By “virtue,” this scholarship understands cultivated traits required to be considered a “good scholar” or a “good scientist” in different historical periods. Developing this approach further, recent historiography has proposed extending the application of “virtue” as an analytical tool beyond the study of purely epistemic aspects of knowledge production and using it to analyse the influence of large-scale rapid political and social transformations on internal processes within science and scholarship. Building on recent developments in political epistemology, our conference aims to advance this line of inquiry.

We propose to examine how military and, more broadly, combat-mobilisation discourses have been linked to the promotion of visions of science and scholarship shaped by the logic of war. We ask how, in various historical, regional, political, and social contexts, scientists and scholars have been compelled or encouraged to make “defeating the enemy” and “defending sovereignty” central elements of their academic practice, as well as which “virtues” they were expected to cultivate in order to meet these demands. We are especially interested in how “war virtues” transformed both the sciences and the humanities; in what ways these “virtues” reshaped academic institutions; what influence they had on the drawing of boundaries between science and political power; and what forms of resistance to the promotion of “war virtues” emerged in different academic contexts.

We warmly welcome papers addressing various aspects of this topic, as well as those proposing new perspectives on “war virtues” as an analytical tool. The conference will focus primarily on modern contexts, but we also welcome papers dealing with early modern, medieval, and ancient topics. Alongside European and US-American subjects, we encourage contributions addressing non-“Western” contexts.

Please send your abstract (max. 300 words) and a short CV or a link to your online profile by 20 December 2026 to wissenschaftsgeschichte@uni-erfurt.de

The conference is organised by the research centre Political Epistemologies of Central and Eastern Europe (PECEE). 

For questions, please contact Dr. Alexej Lochmatow: alexej.lochmatow@uni-erfurt.de