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Imitation—Assimilation—Transformation
Epistems, Semantics and Practices of Assimilation in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Andreas Kilcher together with Michael Hampe, Harald Fischer-Tiné, Alexander Honold

Supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation

The Research Training Group "Imitation - Assimilation - Transformation. Episteme, Se-mantiken und Praktiken der Anverwandlung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert" at ETH Zurich is dedicated to the various forms and adaptation procedures of the discourse of adaptation and imitation and intends to intensify a critical dialogue between the disciplines in order to work out assimilation as a genuinely transgressive phenomenon. The various biological, socio-historical, cultural-analytical and poetological perspectives are to be brought together and made productive for each other in order to illustrate adaptive and mimetic processes in their complex and tense dynamics within different (knowledge) contexts. The research project brings together under its umbrella a small number of doctoral projects with a decidedly interdisciplinary orientation. Its concern is to create a forum of debate that makes visible the practices and cultural techniques of appropriation in their paradigmatic relevance for different disciplines of knowledge since the end of the 18th century. In this way, the Kolleg combines an interdisciplinary orientation on the themes of assimilation and adaptation with a foundation of discipline-related competences and knowledge. In this way, those doctoral students who are pursuing empirical questions should also be offered an appropriate framework for the formulation of imitation, assimilation and transformation as key categories of research in the cultural and social sciences, but also in the history of knowledge.

Publications on the project:

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