When is the right time to know something? What difficulties arise if knowledge is created prematurely or tardily? How do fears about the punctuality of knowing shape the tools applied to knowledge problems? And how is the historian's understanding of the past configured by her concepts of time?
This panel investigates how the practice of scholarly and investigative programs is linked to distinct understandings of and anxieties about time in different contexts. It will consider not only how the temporal modes of those who conceive projects inform goals and planning, but also how the portrayal of those projects is determined by the temporal assumptions of observers: the pressure to deliver results on the clock and results that will last; the distinct temporal orientations of the cathedral builder, the industrial time-manager, the historicist legal-scholar; the many granularities of time in diverse fora at home and abroad. It will examine how time-scales and timing-schemes figure in disciplines like historiography (past and present), to architecture, economics, biology, and philology. Projects meant to be “timeless” will be examined alongside historiographical questions about “availability”: which versions of the past are accessible from which vantages, and what sort of ruptures make new world-views possible?
“Timing Knowledge” takes time both as an historical object and a point of methodological reflection. By assessing the restless tension between the timelessness and timeliness of knowing, between fluid contingencies and fixed truths, the panel attempts to move the conversation from “knowing what” and “knowing how” to “knowing when.”
