Global History of Science Seminar (GHOSS)

Abstract: 

Scholars agree that in his short story Ein Hungerkünstler (1922) (A Hunger Artist), Franz Kafka reproduced his own experience as a witness of public fasts – a popular source of entertainment in European (and American) cities around 1900. In earlier times, public fasting had been an act of religious abstinence and mystical asceticism, but it progressively became a commodity in the urban marketplace, which could be exploited for amusement and profit, but also as an appealing subject for scientific study. Although they could not compete with opera, animal menageries, freak shows, panoramas or early cinema, hunger artists’ performances attracted considerable interest. In spite of frequent suspicion of fraud, their shows were reported in newspapers, popular leaflets, but also in academic textbooks, scientific periodicals and medical journals

The paper discusses how professional fasters populated the “land of hunger artists”, a “strange” territory, which does not fit into national containers, standard biographies, narratives of scientific progress and modernity, or into traditional approaches to scientific experiments and medical specialities. The land of the hunger artists grew in a very large, loosely defined territory, which transcended cities, regions, nation-states and continents. Although the specific places in which fasting performances took place were mainly cities, the geography of hunger artists was much broader and idly defined.

Agustí Nieto-Galan: Catedrático de Historia de la Ciencia en la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) e investigador ICREA Academia (2009 & 2018). Químico e historiador, ha sido investigador de la Facultad de Historia Moderna de la Universidad de Oxford y del Centro Nacional de la Investigación Científica (CNRS) de París. Su investigación se ha centrado en la historia de la química (siglos XVIII-XX), la historia de la divulgación científica (siglos XVIII-XX), la historia urbana de la ciencia, y las relaciones entre ciencia y política en el siglo XX. Sus últimos libros son The Politics of Chemistry (Cambridge University Press, 2019) y Tóxicos invisibles (Icaria, 2020; editado con Ximo Guillem-Llobat). Actualmente dirige el nuevo Institut d'Història de la Ciència (IHC) de la UAB.