Blogging Histories of Knowledge in Washington, DC

The authors reflect on their experiences as the founding editors of the History of Knowledge blog. Situating the project in its specific institutional, geographical, and historiographical contexts, they highlight its role in scholarly communication and research alongside journals and books in a research domain that is still young, especially when viewed from an international perspective. At the same time, the authors discuss the blog’s role as a tool for classifying and structuring a corpus of work as it grows over time and as new themes and connections emerge from the contributions of its many authors

Joint sequencing of human and pathogen genomes reveals the genetics of pneumococcal meningitis.

Streptococcus pneumoniae is a common nasopharyngeal colonizer, but can also cause life-threatening invasive diseases such as empyema, bacteremia and meningitis. Genetic variation of host and pathogen is known to play a role in invasive pneumococcal disease, though to what extent is unknown. In a genome-wide association study of human and pathogen we show that human variation explains almost half of variation in susceptibility to pneumococcal meningitis and one-third of variation in severity, identifying variants in CCDC33 associated with susceptibility. Pneumococcal genetic variation explains a large amount of invasive potential (70%), but has no effect on severity. Serotype alone is insufficient to explain invasiveness, suggesting other pneumococcal factors are involved in progression to invasive disease. We identify pneumococcal genes involved in invasiveness including pspC and zmpD, and perform a human-bacteria interaction analysis. These genes are potential candidates for the development of more broadly-acting pneumococcal vaccines

"Civilizing the other and civilizing the self" - Simone Lässig at Yale‘s Jewish History Colloquium

Simone Lässig presented her recent research on nineteenth-century German-Jewish history at Yale‘s Jewish History Colloquium on May 2nd, 2017. Her talk "Civilizing the other and civilizing the self: Religion, social knowledge, and cultural practices in Jewish sermons of the early 19th century” looked at the work of preachers and rabbis such as Eduard Kley, Gotthold Salomon and Salomon Pleaser and highlighted the importance of sermons and religious speeches as a means of guiding and educating i..

The Duty to Know: Nineteenth-Century Jewish Catechisms and Manuals and the Making of Jewish Religious Knowledge

A contribution to the blog series "Learning by the book" at the GHI's History of Knowledge Blog and in anticipation of a presentation at the conference "Learning by the Book: Manuals and Handbooks in the History of Knowledge" at Princeton University, June 6-10, 2018: In 1878 Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800–1882), probably the most famous nineteenth-century German-Jewish painter, created a work entitled The Heder, or Jewish Elementary School, which re-imagined his first school in Hanau near Fran..

Forthcoming Publication

Simone Lässig and Mirjam Rürup edited a volume on  Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History with Berghahn Books which also features articles by Kerstin von der Krone and Dirk Sadowski. The volume will be published in June 2017

Session at the Annual Meeting of the AHA - Denver, January 5-8, 2017

Simone Lässig and Kerstin von der Krone attended the 131st Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, which took place in Denver on January 5-8, 2017. Together they oragnized the session "The Dynamics of Religious Knowledge: Resilience and Innovation in the Face of Modernity", which explored religious knowledge as a signifier for the transformation of social and cultural orders on the threshold of modernity. Three papers — presented by Anthony Steinhoff (University du Québec à Mo..

Upcoming Conference "Agents of Cultural Change: Jewish and Other Responses to Modernity, ca. 1750–1900"

On October 8–10, 2018 the German Historical Institute Washington DC (GHI) will host the concluding conference of our research project. Organized by Simone Lässig, Zohar Shavit and Kerstin von der Krone the conference will provide an opportunity to discuss our findings  with a group of international scholars from a variety of disciplines. We aim to situate our research within the broader historiographical context and the research on social and cultural transformations and ask more generally wh..

Analytischer Vergleich der neuen dreidimensionalen Fähigkeiten des Flash Player 10 mit gängigen 3D-Engines für ActionScript 3.0 auf Basis des Flash Player 9

Die vorliegende Bachelorarbeit beschäftigt sich mit den neuen nativen Transformationsmöglichkeiten des Flash Players in der Version 10. Zunächst wird ein näherer Blick auf die Geschichte der Technologie Flash und im Besonderen auf dessen Scriptsprache ActionScript geworfen. Im Anschluss werden die konkreten Untersuchungsbeispiele vorgestellt und die Unter-suchungsmethoden erläutert. Auf Grundlage der erhobenen Daten erfolgt am Ende ein qualifiziertes Fazit