Short Bio
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is historian / historical theorist at Bielefeld University. He has been assistant professor at Leiden University and visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
He works at the intersections of history of science, theory and philosophy of history, history of knowledge, history of ideas, Anthropocene research, and science and technology studies. He has written extensively on historical time and questions of temporality, and on the challenges posed by contemporary technoscience and the Anthropocene to the human condition and to modern historical thinking. His articles can be read in the journals History and Theory, European Journal of Social Theory, Anthropocene Review, History of the Human Sciences, Rethinking History, European Review of History, the Journal of the Philosophy of History, and the Journal of Social History.
Zoltán's first book History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century came out in 2019 with Bloomsbury. His second book The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Words was published by Palgrave in 2020.
Zoltán is involved in a variety of collaborative projects. He has been editing a volume on the current shape of historical understanding together with Lars Deile: Historical Understanding: Past, Present, and Future has been published with Bloomsbury in 2022. With Kirill Postoutenko and Willibald Steinmetz, Zoltán has been putting together a special issue for Time & Society (30:4 | 2021) on "Temporal Comparisons." With Marek Tamm and Ewa Domańska, they have written a conversational piece for the Anthropocene special issue of Rethinking History (2021) on “anthropocenic historical knowledge.” Julia Adeney Thomas and Zoltán have written a joint article for the Focus Section “Rethinking History of Science in the Anthropocene” for the June 2022 issue of the journal Isis with the title "Earth System Science, Anthropocene Historiography, and Three Forms of Human Agency."
Finally, Zoltán is engaged in a large scale and long term agenda-setting collaboration with Marek Tamm since 2017, which involves co-authored articles, co-editing a theme issue for the Journal of the Philosophy of History (14:3 | 2020) on "Historical Thinking and the Human" and a collective research programme / publishing experiment in cooperation with the journal History and Theory under the title "Historical Futures." Teaming up with History and Theory, the project featured contributions in an experimental serial publishing format on a rolling basis in each issue of History and Theory over the course of four years, from the March 2021 issue to H&T to the journal's September 2024 issue. Zoltán and Marek have recently published a short joint book, The Fabric of Historical Time (2023), with Cambridge University Press, as part of the series Cambridge Elements in Historical Theory and Practice.
07/2022-03/2023 Gerda Henkel Stiftung project "The End of History and the End of the World"
01/2023 Leading Researcher Grant, Tallinn University, Centre of Excellence in Intercultural Studies
04/2021-08/2021 Visiting fellowship at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
04/2020-03/2022 Research Fellowship at Bielefeld University
08/2019-04/2021 Assistant professor at Leiden University
10/2018-11/2020 Deputy speaker of the Center for Theories in Historical Research at Bielefeld University (board member from January 2017 to November 2020)
04/2018-10/2018 Research fellowship
10/2017-12/2017 Research associate at Bielefeld University
- Historicism and Constructionism: Two Ideas of Historical Change. Project within SFB 1288 / Practices of Comparing: Ordering and Changing the World
2008-2014 Independent researcher
2003-2008 Studies in History
- ELTE, Budapest