The project is scheduled to begin on 1 March 2026, and will run for a period of 18 months. The funding raised totals approximately €400,000, which will be allocated to workshops, research trips, student assistants, and research semesters. The project will also be incorporated into the BCDSS's new Research Area E (Alternative Archives and Life Writing) and the BCDSS Methods Lab.
About the Project:
Names matter. A name indicates personhood and denotes a social and legal entity. Yet, historically, namelessness matters even more. Most individuals mentioned in sources of the past are nameless, with those belonging to minoritized groups even less likely to be identified by name. Despite the prevalence of nameless individuals in the historical record, they present serious challenges for the study of past person data and are therefore rarely collected or studied systematically. What tools do we need to investigate namelessness in historical person data? How can we use such data to produce new knowledge about past societies? How can we write histories about past humans without names? What does ethical research into namelessness look like and how can we decolonize the violence inherent in naming without reproducing other forms of epistemic violence? The project addresses these questions in a comparative, diachronic and multidisciplinary fashion. Its aim is to collaboratively develop a robust set of protocols able to be used across Humanities disciplines for identifying and analyzing the nameless, and in this way to lay the groundwork for a different "history from below".
About the Funding Initiative:
The VolkswagenStiftung's 'Open Up – New Research Spaces for the Humanities and Cultural Studies' funding initiative supports projects that aim to support researchers in the humanities and cultural studies who 'open up' new areas of research and knowledge by jointly exploring complex and previously unexplored topics. By funding collaborations between two or three researchers, the Foundation aims to maximise the creative potential of different areas of expertise and perspectives interacting with each other.