Hamlet and Succession
May 24–25, 2013
The focus of the workshop is the topic of succession: How are families, populations, hives, communities, and states renewed? What are the mechanisms for determining who succeeds to a position of authority, be it executive or reproductive? How are the procedures of succession established, and what happens when they do not work? We propose to take as the particular pivot point of our conversation a text that all of us, from our very different perspectives, will have in common: Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Obsessed with all that is rank and rotten in transitions between regimes, spouses, and generations—convinced that the act of generation is itself polluted—Hamlet teases out the violence latent in the familiar and inevitable replacement, at the interface of the public and private spheres, of one person or structure with another.
By juxtaposing temporally, methodologically, and philosophically distinct accounts of succession, we hope, as a group, to uncover points of mutual illumination among disciplines, identifying ways that the questions of one discipline may deepen or usefully estrange the questions of another. In equal measure, we anticipate and invite points of tension in the form of conflict over what constitutes a meaningful question and disagreement about the evidentiary standards of valuable answers.
Convener
Contact
Participants
Lorraine J.
Daston
Permanent Fellow
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin
Luca
Giuliani
Permanent Fellow
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Margreta
de Grazia
University of Pennsylvania
Bruce
Kogut
Fellow
2012/2013
Columbia University
Shakti
Lamba
Fellow
2012/2013
Universität Exeter
Christoph
Möllers
Permanent Fellow
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Franco
Moretti
Former Permanent Fellow
Stanford University
Catherine
Robson
Fellow
2008/2009
University of California, Davis
David Warren
Sabean
Fellow
2001/2002
University of California, Los Angeles
Paul
Schmid-Hempel
Former Permanent Fellow
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich
Amrita
Shah
Shah
Froma
Zeitlin
Fellow
2012/2013
Princeton University