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The Center

Center for Intellectual History

The Center for Intellectual History supports and produces research on Argentine and Latin American intellectual history. It traces its origins to the Program for History and Cultural Analysis, founded in 1994 by Oscar Terán at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. In 1996, still under the direction of Terán, it was renamed the Intellectual History Program; Terán remained its director until 2005, followed by Carlos Altamirano; Adrián Gorelik became director in 2009. In 2011, the Intellectual History Program became the current Center for Intellectual History, with directors rotating every five years: Gorelik remained its director until 2016; followed by Elías Palti (2017-2021); and, Jorge Myers (2022-present).

Intellectual history is a field of study that focuses on the role of representations in historical life, including representations mediated and theorized by cultural elites. Its object of study are ideas and ideological languages as well as intellectual and symbolic productions, which it seeks to understand as part of a social fabric and collective experience without discarding the intrinsic analysis of their meanings and the materiality (textual or otherwise) in which they have been produced or circulated.

In recent years, this area of study has made significant contributions to the broader field of historical research, and brought to light new questions for the historiography of our country, Argentina. As it is the case that here, as in the rest of Latin America, there are still few groups specializing in this topic, the Center for Intellectual History has sought to promote and elevate the contributions of this field of study at the national and regional levels.

Beyond its commitment to supporting the research of its members and training its fellows and doctoral students, the Center carries out four basic activities: the publication of the annual journal Prismas, which has been in continuous publication for 29 years; the organization of regular national and international conferences and seminars on various topics; the formation of multinational and multidisciplinary work teams to carry out collective projects on a Latin American scale; and the Master's Degree in Intellectual History, which, under the direction of Martín Bergel, has been running since 2020 as part of the Graduate School of the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes.

Areas of work

With the economic support of the University, members of the Center hold regular meetings, develop lines of inquiry and carry out the following research projects.

This research –which continues work completed from 2022-2024–analyzes the participation of intellectual women in the international promotion of images and ideas related to the future of Latin America during the first half of the 20th century. To this end, this project bridges the history of intellectuals, women's history, gender studies, and the cultural turn in diplomatic history; it aims specifically to: a) identify discourses on the particularity and future of Latin America formulated by Latin American women intellectuals during the first half of the 20th century, b) examine the historical trajectory of those ideas, paying particular attention to the development of intellectual projects and practices related to images of and questions related to the continent, c) distinguish national, regional, and international spheres of action and deployment of these projects, d) evaluate the extent to which these projects were developed from subordinate roles or positions or whether they achieved recognition from peers, f) detect links of solidarity and support with other women who participated in the discussion on the future of Latin America.

This project builds upon the so-called “global turn” in the humanities in recent decades, which invited consideration of global frameworks in order to understand and situate historical and cultural processes. Since the 1990s, disciplines such as economics, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, as well as the social sciences and humanities, have developed a discourse and a set of research initiatives on contemporary globalization and its multiple implications.

History was slow to join this field, and only did so when the question of global connections and contexts moved away from recent experience to also interrogate more distant pasts. Thus emerged a so-called global history, with its calls to deprovincialize perspectives of analysis and to scrutinize the habitual tendency toward “methodological nationalism,” that is, to uncritically naturalize national spatiality as a sufficient framework for understanding historical processes.

Latin America's place in global history, as well as the relevance of developing such approaches from an intellectual history perspective came into view within this framework. In dialogue with perspectives such as those of Sebastian Conrad in his “What is Global History?”, or Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori in their programmatic compilation Global Intellectual Historythis research aims to promote a field of inquiry into intellectuals, their discourses, and their cultural artifacts that considers at least three dimensions: a) the contexts in which intellectuals operate, critically interrogating the habitual tendency to circumscribe them within national frameworks; b) intellectuals as connectors or mediators between cultures, whether through translation practices, travel, the publication of works in foreign languages, the production of magazines with contributors from diverse spaces, etc.; c) questions about forms of global consciousness among intellectuals: intellectual discourses and practices that contemplate internationalist, cosmopolitan, universalist dimensions, etc.

Global intellectual history, understood in this way, does not equate—as is sometimes mistakenly believed—world history, or a history of the entire globe; rather, it is grounded in a set of questions about the contexts, connections, and discourses of intellectuals and in relation to their forms of connection to transnational or global scenarios. The conjecture is that shifting the usual frameworks in which the sphere of intellectual action is conceived will contribute to a better and more complete understanding of intellectuals’ historical praxis.

This research builds upon reconceptualizations of the cultural Cold War, but does so from a particular perspective. Most research on the cultural Cold War has focused on the study of the production, trajectories, and organizational logic of institutions linked to one of the main countries involved, as well as their ability to exert pressure and impose various agendas (cultural, academic, etc.); this work, however, looks beyond the framework of culture produced by the educated elite to analyze a complex network of meanings woven between elite interventions and those that take place within the framework of mass culture, and the analytical categories of the intellectual, artistic, and academic fields themselves, through which attempts were made to interpret and shape the meaning of changes in the regional political-cultural arena. In this sense, this project includes works that study the cultural representations and practices of the Cold War and those that take into account the range of meanings associated with culture, mass culture, popular culture, and cultural industry. These were contentious issues during the period: mass culture, popular culture, and culture industries were analyzed, questioned, or celebrated, with intensity and fears regarding the ability of cultural products to manipulate populations, modify behaviors, paralleled the anxieties of the Cold War itself.

Given this, this research holds the following aims: to analyze the cultural Cold War according to the multiple meanings and practices associated with culture and mass culture and taking into account the anxieties of the Cold War; to address the conflicting imaginaries related to Latin America, culture, science, ideology, propaganda, war, (other terms may be added if deemed necessary); to select a series of events and cultural objects in which to analyze how these complex networks of meanings about culture and cultural practices acted within the framework of the Cold War; to study how they were woven together under the aegis of the Cold War or, on the contrary, how they brought about other battles that could not necessarily be summarized in the bipolar confrontation.

Specifically, it will: shed light on Cold War information battles, particularly as related to revolutionary events in Bolivia (1952-1964) and Cuba (1959-1962) and with regard to various actors and forums, including news agencies, revolutionary groups, intellectuals, and academic publications; analyze how these actors and forums reproduced in their practices and critiques their own anxieties related to mass culture while communicating or validating the question and scope of these revolutions; and reconstruct and interpret the contexts of meaning and appropriation of these revolutions in Latin America and the United States. This line of questioning will also examine the transnationalization of the figure of Eva Perón through the rock opera Evita by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice (1976), taking into account its circulation, its theatrical performances in different countries in order to reconstruct and interpret the different contexts of meaning and appropriation of the figure of Eva Perón (and the concomitant imaginaries about Peronism). It will pay particular attention to the cases of Spain and Mexico –the first countries where the musical was adapted into Spanish– and investigate the processes of iconization of Latin American figures such as Che Guevara and Eva Perón, within political, ideological, and cultural conflicts of the period.

This research seeks to reconstruct the changes that took place in regard to the forms of representation and symbolization of the social world, in traditional political identities, and in political thought in several Latin American countries during the second half of the 20th century. The study of political languages breaks down the opposition between ideas and reality, between history and concepts; given this, this approach focuses on the processes of production, articulation, and disarticulation of meanings about the political system. The objects of analysis will be historical reconstructions of political discourses and concepts; political-ideological traditions and the trajectories of intellectuals; the ways in which these experiences were re-signified in narratives, rituals, and commemorative practices; and magazines as political-cultural supports and political-ideological actors. Focus will be placed on the political-intellectual debates around populism and socialism in Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina between 1968 and 2000.

Few capital cities have established such close and persistent relations as Buenos Aires and Montevideo; this is particularly the case when one considers the two cities’ shared mass culture and intellectual production. For this reason, those who characterize this interrelationship often adopt an ad hoc category to recognize the degree to which it extends beyond “transnational contact”: the idea of a common cultural region, an “area” made up of both cities and the river that connects them. The intersection between Uruguayan and Argentine cultures is so extensive, productive, and convincing that, as is often the case when a topic is so self-evident, the larger question is why it has not been addressed until now. There are, of course, invaluable works that serve as antecedents for this project; however, for the most part, these approaches take the intense relationship between the cities as a given, instead focusing on particularities and specifics. What has not yet been articulated in regional historiography, then, is the very fabric of the relationship itself, approached as a whole, and in such a way that its distinctive intensity is no longer treated as an unproblematic given, but instead the core of a new inquiry into the intellectual and cultural history of the two countries. The fundamental purpose of this project is to reconstruct the web of relations that, across the long span of the 19th and 20th centuries, gave substance to this “zone” as a problem of intellectual and cultural history.

Within the web of relations between the two cities, four frames will be distinguished, formulated here as a heuristic hypothesis. Each combines a set of issues and analytic approaches: (1) the river and communication infrastructures did not only form the groundwork on which the dynamic link between the two cities was established, but they also developed a representative quality, a landscape constituting a “cultural zone”; (2) political-intellectual contacts, often fueled by diverse experiences of exile; (3) the development of a powerful mass culture that came to exhibit an integrated market across both shores; and (4) intellectual and artistic exchanges, including dialogues across different fields of knowledge. Each frame speaks to a variety of perspectives; the regional nature of the project certainly implies a type of collective work that is central to the proposal itself and to the existence of the group that formulated it, which faces the dual historiographical challenge of addressing a joint intellectual history of significant periods of Argentine and Uruguayan cultures, and a history of communication between two urban cultures that gave rise to the configuration of a shared “cultural arena” for the two cities.

The overall objective of this research is to reconsider key aspects of the political history of workers in Argentina between 1880 and 1945. It explores issues related to labor protests, the formation and nature of class identities, the relationship between workers and the state, the experiences of confrontation and inclusion of the working classes in public life, and the political culture of the protagonists. It focuses on organized workers in large coastal cities. It also aims to connect the agenda of studies on the history of workers and labor protests with other highly relevant but less-integrated research agendas. Among these are those focused on the political and social history of the period under study, which offer highly innovative perspectives that are not always well reflected in studies on the world of workers.

The purpose of this research is to examine—through the tools of intellectual history, contextual analysis of ideas, and the history of concepts—the transnational processes by which the region’s political and social vocabularies were modified and re-signified in the mid-19th century. These processes correspond to the final stage of the Sattelzeit postulated by Reinhart Koselleck and to the “double revolution” proposed by Eric Hobsbawm, centered in the European revolutionary cycle of 1848–49.

The focus will be on four Latin American regional/national spaces –and historical moments– in which dialogue and interaction with the vocabularies coined (or re-signified) in the context of the revolutions of 1848 became especially pronounced: New Granada between 1849 and 1854, when the cycle of the “liberal” revolution that culminated in a “red” and artisan government in Bogotá; Montevideo during the siege from 1843 to 1851, when it was a melting pot of nationalities and ideologies; Pernambuco (in the Empire of Brazil) at the time of the “Praieira” Revolution (1848–49); and Chile during the years of the Chilean “Jirondinos” and the revolution of 1851, dominated by Society of Equality. Two contexts in which interaction with the discursive effects of 1848 came later will also be considered: Mexico and the Argentine Confederation, from 1850–60.

The central hypothesis is that the profound intellectual transformation that took place within these specific junctures and national intellectual sites arose both from unresolved dilemmas shaping local contexts and from new theoretical formulations –and their corresponding conceptual vocabularies– that arrived from beyond national borders. This dual origin, I argue, accounts for the specificity of a discursive universe that must be read and interpreted on its own terms, which are neither exclusively “national” nor exclusively “transnational” or “global.” Rather, they occupy an interstitial position between these dimensions, in a complex and shifting manner that demands an analysis attentive to the very short-term dynamics of the history of discourses and concepts.

This line of inquiry offers a forum for projects that share a common goal: developing historical and cultural perspectives on architectural, urban, and territorial spaces, understood from a public dimension. Such historical-cultural reflection incorporates elements of intellectual history into the study of technical disciplines—their ideas and the technical or intellectual agents operating within them—while also foregrounding the cultural and political significance of architectural, urban, and territorial events as one of the innovative directions currently reshaping intellectual history. This line of inquiry is being carried out in collaboration with the Institute for Science and Technology Studies at UNQ.

Team

Director (2022-2026):
Jorge Myers

Board of directors (2022-2026):
Carlos Altamirano
Alejandro Blanco
Flavia Fiorucci
Silvina Cormick

Researchers
Carlos Altamirano
Anahi Ballent
Martín Bergel
Alejandro Blanco
Sebastián Carassai
Laura Ehrlich
Gabriel Entin
Ximena Espeche
Flavia Fiorucci
Martina Garategaray
Facundo Gómez
Adrián Gorelik
Roy Hora
Ana Lucía Magrini
Ricardo Martínez Mazzola
Jorge Myers
Elías Palti
Laura Prado Acosta
Santiago Roggerone
Mariana Rosetti
Cecilia Tossounian
Dhan Zunino Singh

PhD Candidates
Silvina Cormick
Lucas D’ Avenia
Cecilia Durán
Matías Iglesias
Melisa Redondo

OJS Prismas:
Ana María Viñas A

Communications Manager
María Noel Alvarez

Design
Fabián Muggeri

Web development
Ana Luz Bustamante