The project Forensic Culture. A Comparative Analysis of Forensic Practices in Europe, 1930-2000 (FORCe), funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant, starts from the idea that cultural ideas and practices have been major determinants in the position of science in the courtroom. To expose the power of culture, the research project will compare forensic practices in four European countries (the Netherlands, England, Spain and Russia) with differing legal systems and ideologies. It will focus on criminal cases in which gender plays an important role, such as rape, murder and infanticide. These cases often play out in the media as well as the courtroom and can demonstrate the influence of cultural images of gender on the role of European forensic science.

• Pauline Dirven
• dr. Sara Serrano Martínez
• Lara Bergers
• Anne van Dam MA

The goal of this project is to present a new view on the rise of medical expertise around 1850. The conventional historical narrative assumes the straightforward authority of doctors who started giving advice in civil society and politics, attempting to solve problems caused by industrialization and urbanization with the help of new technologies. This research project, on the contrary, aims to show how the attribution of authority to medical experts was much more contested, underlining that expertise is constructed by scientists themselves, but must also be accepted or rejected by an audience. The project’s main research question is: How was expertise on body and mind constructed, attributed and contested in the Netherlands between 1800 and 1930? Four elements are considered to have impacted on the attribution or withdrawal of expertise: technologies, audience, the relationship between lay and expert knowledge and the rules and boundaries of the ‘arenas’, the places where expertise is debated. Specifically, it will be analysed how forensic doctors came to be seen as experts in court. Overall, this research will provide a new approach to studying expertise, its methodology derived from historical anthropology, praxiography, feminist epistemology and science and technology studies. By studying expertise as a social process, rather than as a fixed attribute, the mechanisms behind the construction, attribution and rejection of expertise become visible, facilitating a comparison with the present-day erosion of scientific expertise. 

The International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity (HCM) is a new, peer reviewed journal that offers a forum for interdisciplinary scholarship in the domain of the humanities. The aim of the journal is to stimulate research and a lively academic exchange on the cultural history of global modernity. The journal welcomes new historical approaches, especially those contributing to present-day debates and facilitating a global perspective.
HCM intends to fill a niche within historical scholarship: now that postmodernism seems to be in decline, ‘modernity’ has resurfaced as a highly topical and relevant theme, deserving to be studied from a global, cultural, and interdisciplinary perspective. There are very few English-language journals in the field of cultural history and none of them addresses the global and/or transdisciplinary aspects of ‘modernity’. 
HCM’s mission statement dovetails with the philosophy of open access: a critical historical perspective implies unlimited access, by scholars from anywhere in the world, to the results of scholarly research via the internet.

The International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity (HCM) considers scholarly contributions that relate topics in cultural history to the wider context of modernity. The journal welcomes new and critical historical approaches, especially those contributing to present-day debates and facilitating a global perspective.

• prof. dr. Ed Jonker
• prof. dr. Joris van Eijnatten