Bart Karstens

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Vrije Universiteit in colloboration with the Vossius Center (UvA) in the project 'The Flow of Cognitive Goods. Towards a Postdisciplinary Historiography of Knowledge'. The aim of the project is to gain a deeper understanding of the relations between different scientific disciplines by looking at the way they have exchanged so-called 'cognitive goods': an umbrella term for almost anything that can move around i.e. concepts, metaphors, methods, models, instruments, etc. In the context of this project I trace the trajectory that the concepts of 'structure' and 'structuralism' have traversed through various academic specialties in the 19th and 20th centuries.

From 2014-2016 I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Amsterdam Center for Law and Economics in collaboration with the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (both UvA) on the Digging into Data Challenge award winning project 'Legal Structures'. The project has yielded a tool to parse legal texts, another tool to represent network structures of legal texts and a network analysis of the specific networks structures that were obtained. My main contribution to this joint project was the network analysis for which I used R packages and GEPHI.

In 2015 I defended my dissertation  at Leiden University titled 'Pluralism within Parameters. Towards a Mature Evaluative Historiography of Science'. In the dissertation I defend a radically comparative interpretation of 'wrong' and 'right'. I also argue that this interpretation can fruitfully serve as a basis for evaluations of past science, which have almost entirely disappeared from historiographical practice.

In 2009 I graduated cum laude from the research master in history of science (Descartes Centre, Utrecht University) with a thesis on the 19th century linguist Franz Bopp. On the basis of this case study I have developed an interpretation of discipline formation as a process of hybridization which is published here. In 2003 I obtained a master's degree (old drs. style) in Artificial Intelligence with a specialisation in Computational Linguistics and Logic.

Currently I serve as an executive officer of the Society for the History of Humanities and as a managing editor of the journal History of Humanities. Within the Vossius Center I coordinate the Vossius Circle for the History of Linguistics. I have recently become a member of the board of the series 'History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences' that is published by Language Science Press (Berlin).

I have taught courses at both BA and MA level at the Insitute of History (Utrecht), Philosophy (Leiden), International Studies (Leiden, Campus The Hague), Law (UvA), Economics (UvA), Artificial Intelligence (UvA), Computer Science (UvA) and Information Studies (UvA). I have also supervised Bachelor and Master theses and currently act as a co-promotor in three dissertation projects. 

No ancillary activities

Ancillary activities are updated daily