© Universität Bielefeld
Mission Statement
Concepta is an academic network that offers introductory-level summer courses as well as advanced research seminars which bring together doctoral students, early-career scholars and leading specialists interested in conceptual history. Created in 2006, Concepta has organized more than twenty events that have served as global meeting places and training grounds for academics from various disciplinary and institutional backgrounds.
Concepta proceeds from the assumption that concepts are neither timeless nor unchanging. Rather, they are sites of rhetorical actions around which arguments, discourses and vocabularies turn. Drawing upon the traditions of Begriffsgeschichte as developed by Reinhart Koselleck and contextualist intellectual history advocated by Quentin Skinner and others in the “Cambridge School,” Concepta is dedicated to exploring and deepening the connection between conceptual history and political theory.