Self-observation and self-empowerment in the American Enlightenment (A03)

• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 394775490

The historical transformation of established practices of vigilance and self-scrutiny is an indelible aspect of the SFB’s overall research agenda. This project looks at how, in the American colonies, religiously inflected forms of vigilance (the Puritan ‘ideology of control’) are being increasingly secularised during the eighteenth century. By analysing a wide variety of written documents, such as diaries, memoirs, personal correspondences, early almanacs etc., it strives to elucidate how new secular regimes of social and individual attentiveness have emerged to eventually provide a cultural template with repercussions well into our own time.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1369: Cultures of Vigilance. Transformations - Spaces - Practices
• Applicant Institution: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
• Project Head: Professor Dr. Klaus Benesch