Ass.-Prof. Sebastian Felten, PhD
Tenure Track Professor of Early Modern History of Science
Ass.-Prof. Sebastian Felten, PhD
Kolingasse 14-16
1090 Wien
Room: 02.37
u:find - Information about
Upcoming events of the Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftsgeschichte and the AG Wissenschaftsgeschichte, a monthly colloquium on the history of science, that I co-convene with Anna Echterhölter and Nils Güttler.
Sebastian Felten (PhD, King’s College London) is a historian of science, finance, and bureaucracy in early modern Europe. He is Tenure Track Professor of Early Modern History of Science at the Department of History at the University of Vienna and was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin (MPIWG) between 2015 and 2018. He is PI of the ERC STG Project "Sustained Concerns: Administration of Mineral Resource Extraction in Central Europe, 1550-1850" (SCARCE, 2023-2028).
A collective volume on Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge, which is the result of a working group at the MPIWG (co-convened with Christine von Oertzen), was published in December 2020.
Recent single-authored publications include papers on Enlightenment ergonomics, distributed cognition in early modern mines; the revival of early modern mining culture during the Nazis' war effort, and bureaucratic rationality. Open-access versions of my published work can be found on https://uscholar.univie.ac.at/.
ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8194-4112
His current research explores knowledge about nature through a focus on mineral resources as they featured in metallurgy, mineralogy, economics, and ergonomics. He has studied commerce and bureaucracy using the tools of historical epistemology to build bridges between the history of science and social, cultural and economic history. His objective for the next years is to apply this integrated approach to understand the peculiar rationality of early modern resource extraction in Central Europe, which was often highly contradictory. In caring for workers, officials and experts rationalised harm; in seeing to the financial viability of mines, they curtailed profits; in setting up self-sustaining mining operations, they externalised risks to local communities who competed for water and access to forests; in producing authoritative knowledge about mining they made its adverse effects less visible. While this state-centred system was dismantled during liberal reforms in the 1850s, its culture of extraction survived. Engineers and administrative experts adopted this culture during their training at Central European mining academies before going on to work for private companies during the age of globalising industrial capitalism from 1850 onwards.
ERC Starting Grant "Sustained Concerns: Administration of Mineral Resource Extraction in Central Europe, 1550-1850" (SCARCE, 2023-2028)
The extraction of mineral resources has sharply increased over the past hundred years, and the ongoing transition to “green energy” is driving demand for minerals such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt. SCARCE provides a critical history of today's stakeholder conflicts by showing how contradictory principles of resource management – economic development, sustainability, and technological innovation – were forged in proto-industrial settings. It explores alternative, historical ways of provisioning for communities, making them available for current debates on environmental degradation and climate emergency.
Project Homepage: https://scarce.univie.ac.at/
Preliminary studies for this project have appeared in the Journal for the History of Knowledge, WerkstattGeschichte, History of Science, and Renaissance Studies.
First book: Money in the Dutch Republic: Everyday Practice and Circuits of Exchange (March 2022)
This book focuses on chemical and mathematical practices to tell a new history of money in the early modern world, written from the viewpoint of the Dutch Republic. It depicts farming communities in interaction with urban elites and describes how peasants and craftsmen, stewards and churchmen, metallurgists and officials fashioned objects into money and kept them in circulation. The book’s narrative picks up at the apogee of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, when the country was a major centre in the European world-system and when hundreds of different monies were used alongside each other. It concludes at a point when most of this plurality had been replaced by more uniform national currency in the nineteenth century. The book argues that mundane acts of scrutiny generated and sustained money’s ability to be exchanged for something else across time, space, and social divides. Mints, banks, professionals but also ‘ordinary users’ such as peasants or labourers forged links between matter and value by creating evidence about objects and by circulating or accepting this information. They could also undo these links by voicing doubts and refusing other people’s evidence. Objects then lost their ability to act as money. The book shows how over time links between matter and value were made more durable through increasing attention to the material properties of money objects and how, paradoxically, this made it more plausible to think of money in immaterial terms. The rationalisation of early modern monies into national currency was pursued by state officials, patriotic economists, and financial experts at political centres, and it ultimately diminished the role that users played in the maintenance of the system.
Introduction can be accessed here: https://uscholar.univie.ac.at/detail/o:1676773
Chapter 1 can be accessed here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/money-in-the-dutch-republic/1597F40C3D62B07D897266C3E22C9E26
A part of the book's argument can be found in this chapter on coins as objects of inquiry.
Recent collective volume: Queer Vienna: Knowledge and Counter-Knowledge in an Emancipatory Archive
Important achievements of the LGBTQ movements against bad or ill-used science have been rolled back or questioned across Europe. To counter these tendencies, this research and writing workshop will ask: What tools, sites, forms of communication, and technologies constitute the counter-knowledge that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer people have developed to understand themselves and communicate to others?
Students at the University of Vienna will conducted archival research at QWIEN Centre for Queer History Vienna and published their findings in the international open-access journal Æther.
The project was supported by the Zukunftsfonds of the Republic of Austria, the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies of the University of Vienna and the Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftsgeschichte.
Curriculum Vitae
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Curriculum Vitae
- since 2023: Tenure Track Professor of Early Modern History of Science
- 2019-2023: University of Vienna, Department of History, Universitätsassistent (Postdoc) in History of Science
- 2022: Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Europe Center
- 2017-2018: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin, Dept. 2 (Daston), Research Fellow
- 2015-2017: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin, Dept. 2 (Daston), Postdoctoral Research Fellow
- 2011-2015: King's College London, Ph.D. (Thesis: "Unlikely Circuits: General Monetisation in a European Rural Society, c. 1700-1900 [Netherlands]")
- 2011-2014: German Historical Institute London, Editorial Assistant of the Digital Humanities Project ”Pauper Letters and Petitions for Poor Relief in Germany and Great Britain, 1770–1914“
- 2010-2011: King's College London, M.A. in Early Modern History
- 2009: Universidad de Buenos Aires, Language course
- 2007: Universiteit van Amsterdam, Study exchange
- 2005–2009: Humboldt-Universität Berlin, B.A. in History and German Literature and Linguistics
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Awards
- 2011: King’s College London, Jinty Nelson Prize
- 2011: King’s College London, Early Modern History Prize
Research
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Research interests
- history of earth sciences
- history of technical sciences
- historical epistemology
- history of knowledge
- sustainability
- resources
- bureaucracy
- financial history
- museums
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Projects
- 2021-2023: Co-convener of Working Group “Resources in the Early Modern World” (with Renée Raphael)
- 2021-2023: Co-organizer of project “Queer Vienna: Knowledge and Counter-Knowledge in an Emancipatory Archive” with students of the University of Vienna and in collaboration with QWIEN Center for Queer History Vienna
- 2016-2021: Member of the Research Group “Affective Economies and Global Knowledge Society”, organized by Prof. Inger Leemans (VU Amsterdam)
- 2017-2022: Member of the authors’ group “Embodying Value: Representing Money in the Early Modern Period”, organized by Prof. Joanna Woodall (Courtauld Institute) and Prof. Natasha Seaman (Rhode Island College)
- 2016-2019: Member of the authors’ group “The Material Culture of the Mines in Early Modern Europe”, organized by Dr. Tina Asmussen (ETHZ)
2016-2022: Co-convener of the Working Group “History of Bureaucratic Knowledge” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin (with PD Dr. Christine von Oertzen)
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Conference organisation
2018
- Co-organizer of the conference “Forgetting Knowledge” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin, in cooperation with the Descartes Center (Utrecht), Vossius Center (Amsterdam) und Huygens ING (Amsterdam), 28 February – 2 March 2018 (co-organizer)
- Authors' meeting of the Working Group History of Bureaucratic Knowledge at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin, 24-26 May 2018 (co-organizer with PD Christine von Oertzen)
2017
- Workshop “Beyond data: Knowledge Production in Bureaucracies across Science, Commerce, and the State” am GHI Washington, 1-3 June 2017 (co-organizer with PD Christine von Oertzen, MPIWG; Prof. Philipp Lehmann, UC Riverside; and Prof. Simone Lässig, GHI)
2016
- Panel “Knowledge Practices in Bureaucracies, 1600 to the Present” auf dem History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Atlanta, 3-6. November 2016.
Professional Service
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Fellowships and Memberships
- History of Science Society
- Renaissance Society of America
- Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, der Medizin und der Technik
- Key Research Area History of Science at the University of Vienna
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Reviewer
Peer-review for:
- History of Science
- Nuncius
- Isis
Book reviews for:
- Renaissance Quarterly
- Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Remote referee for the European Research Council
Publications
In: Isis, Vol. 114, No. 3, 09.2023, p. 599-603.
Publications: Contribution to journal › Article › Peer Reviewed
In: Isis, Vol. 114, No. 3, 09.2023, p. 626-630.
Publications: Contribution to journal › Article › Peer Reviewed
In: Isis. An International Review Devoted to the History of Science and its Cultural Influences, Vol. 114, No. 2, 06.2023, p. 387-392.
Publications: Contribution to journal › Article › Peer Reviewed
Queer Vienna: Einblicke in ein Bewegungsarchiv. ed. / Sebastian Felten; Andreas Brunner; Hannes Sulzenbacher. Zürich: intercom, 2023. p. A1-A11 (Æther, Vol. 8).
Publications: Contribution to book › Chapter
Zürich: intercom, 2023. (Æther, Vol. 8).
Publications: Book › Collection
In: Centaurus: an international journal of the history of science and its cultural aspects, Vol. 64, No. 4, 11.2022, p. 963-966.
Publications: Contribution to journal › Review
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 286 p.
Publications: Book › Peer Reviewed
In: Das Heft : PH-Magazin, Vol. 6, No. 1, 02.2022, p. 9-9.
Publications: Other contribution to periodical › Newspaper/Magazine article
Publications: Electronic/multimedia output › Web publication
In: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 2, 01.05.2021, p. 257-264.
Publications: Contribution to journal › Article › Peer Reviewed
Publications: Electronic/multimedia output › Web publication
Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies. ed. / Anne Goldgar; Inger Leemans. London: Routledge, 2020. p. 276-302 (Knowledge Societies in History, Vol. 3).
Publications: Contribution to book › Chapter › Peer Reviewed
In: Journal for the History of Knowledge (JHoK), Vol. 1, No. 1, 17.12.2020, p. 1-16.
Publications: Contribution to journal › Article › Peer Reviewed
London: Ubiquity Press, 2020. 149 p.
Publications: Book › Collection › Peer Reviewed
In: Journal for the History of Knowledge (JHoK), Vol. 1 (1), No. 14, 17.12.2020, p. 1-15.
Publications: Contribution to journal › Article › Peer Reviewed
In: WerkstattGeschichte, 03.2020, p. 15-36.
Publications: Contribution to journal › Article
In: Renaissance Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1, 01.02.2020, p. 119-148.
Publications: Contribution to journal › Article › Peer Reviewed
Surprise: 107 Variations on the Unexpected [ = Festschrift Lorraine Daston]. ed. / Mechthild Fend; Anke Te Heesen; Christine von Oertzen; Fernando Vidal. Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2019. p. 102-104.
Publications: Contribution to book › Chapter
In: Organization Studies , Vol. 39, No. 12, 01.12.2018, p. 1757-1783.
Publications: Contribution to journal › Article › Peer Reviewed
In: History of Science, Vol. 56, No. 4, 01.12.2018, p. 403-431.
Publications: Contribution to journal › Article › Peer Reviewed