Where will ISIH 2026 be held?

The conference will be held in the city of Istanbul, TUR.

What is the primary focus of ISIH 2026?

The conference focuses on intellectual history, providing a forum for scholars to discuss the evolution of ideas and their impact across different cultures and eras.

International Society for Intellectual History Conference 2026 (ISIH 2026)

Name: International Society for Intellectual History Conference 2026 (ISIH 2026)
Start: 2026-09-18T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-09-20T00:00:00Z
Location: Istanbul

Sep 18–20, 2026Istanbul, TurkeyIn-person

Registration open

The International Society for Intellectual History Conference (ISIH 2026) is scheduled to convene in Istanbul, Turkey. This event serves as a critical forum for scholars and researchers engaged in the study of intellectual history, offering an opportunity to present new findings, discuss emerging methodologies, and foster collaborative networks within the discipline. The conference typically attracts a diverse international audience, reflecting the global scope of intellectual historical inquiry. Participants can anticipate a program featuring a range of scholarly activities, including paper presentations, panel discussions, and possibly keynote addresses from leading figures in the field. The setting in Istanbul, a city with a rich historical and intellectual heritage, provides a unique backdrop for discussions on the evolution of ideas across different cultures and eras.

Committees & topics

Topics
Intellectual Histories of (Dis)order · Ideologies and Order · Legal Orders and Normative Innovation · Empire, Civilisation, and International Order · Knowledge and Classification · Medicine and the Body Politic

Why it matters

The ISIH conference is significant for several reasons. Firstly, it provides a dedicated platform for the advancement of intellectual history as a distinct and interdisciplinary field of study. By bringing together experts from various sub-disciplines and geographical areas, it facilitates a broader understanding of how ideas are formed, transmitted, and transformed over time. This cross-pollination of perspectives is crucial for developing nuanced interpretations of historical phenomena.

Secondly, the conference's location in Istanbul, TUR, is particularly noteworthy. This city has historically been a crossroads of civilizations, serving as a conduit for intellectual exchange between the East and West. Its deep historical layers, from the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman Empire, offer a living context for discussions on intellectual currents that have shaped global thought. This geographical positioning underscores the importance of understanding diverse intellectual traditions and their interconnectedness.

Finally, events like ISIH 2026 contribute to the ongoing scholarly dialogue that underpins effective diplomacy and international relations. By exploring the historical roots of contemporary ideas and ideologies, participants gain insights that can inform current policy debates and foster a more empathetic understanding of different cultural perspectives. Such academic engagements are vital for navigating a complex global landscape.

How to prepare

For those preparing to engage with the themes and discussions at ISIH 2026, a strategic approach is essential. Attendees should consider how their research aligns with the broader objectives of intellectual history, particularly in a global context. Given the location, exploring the intellectual heritage of TUR and its historical connections to other regions, such as those in Europe, Asia, and Africa, could provide valuable context for presentations and discussions.

Prospective participants should also consider the interdisciplinary nature of intellectual history. Engaging with methodologies from fields such as philosophy, sociology, political science, and cultural studies can enrich their contributions. Developing a strong understanding of diverse intellectual traditions, including those beyond the traditionally Western canon, will be particularly beneficial for fostering meaningful dialogue at an international conference of this nature. This approach aligns with the principles of effective engagement strategies, ensuring that contributions resonate with a wide audience.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Türkiye

Host country and a historical nexus of intellectual exchange.

Role in topic

As the host nation, TUR provides a unique historical and geographical context for the conference. Istanbul, its largest city, has been a significant center for intellectual development and cross-cultural dialogue for centuries, influencing and being influenced by intellectual currents from Europe, Asia, and beyond. Its rich history offers a tangible backdrop for discussions on the evolution of ideas.

United Kingdom

Significant contributor to intellectual history scholarship.

Role in topic

Scholars from GBR have historically made substantial contributions to the field of intellectual history, particularly in areas concerning political thought, philosophy, and the history of science. Their participation often brings established theoretical frameworks and extensive archival research to the discussions.

Germany

Strong tradition in historical and philosophical inquiry.

Role in topic

DEU has a profound academic tradition in intellectual history, especially concerning philosophical movements, critical theory, and the history of ideas. German scholarship frequently offers rigorous methodological approaches and deep conceptual analyses to the conference themes.

United States

Diverse and influential academic contributions.

Role in topic

Academics from the USA contribute a wide array of perspectives to intellectual history, often encompassing global intellectual currents, postcolonial studies, and the history of social and political thought. Their engagement often introduces new theoretical lenses and comparative studies.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Intellectual Histories of (Dis)order

Since antiquity, thinkers have grappled with the relationship between order and disorder as a foundational problem of political, social, and metaphysical life. From Plato's Republic and Augustine's City of God to Hobbes's Leviathan and Kant's vision of perpetual peace, Western intellectual traditions have repeatedly framed political legitimacy in terms of taming chaos, while parallel traditions in Chinese Legalism, Confucian thought, and Islamic political philosophy (notably Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah) have offered their own conceptual vocabularies for cycles of order and decay. The Enlightenment intensified efforts to ground order in reason, natural law, and contract, while the upheavals of 1789, 1848, and 1917 forced reconsiderations of whether disorder was pathology, engine of progress, or constitutive of politics itself. Twentieth-century intellectual historians—Reinhart Koselleck on Sattelzeit and crisis, Hannah Arendt on revolution, Michel Foucault on governmentality, and the Cambridge School on political languages—have shown that 'order' is never neutral but encodes contested visions of authority, hierarchy, and exclusion. Postcolonial and global intellectual history have further unsettled Eurocentric narratives, asking whose disorder was being suppressed when imperial order was imposed. Today, scholarship on populism, climate disruption, and the so-called crisis of the liberal international order has renewed interest in the conceptual genealogies that shape how contemporary actors diagnose disorder and prescribe its remedies.

Key players

Ideologies and Order

The concept of ideology, coined by Destutt de Tracy during the French Revolution as a 'science of ideas,' was rapidly transformed by Napoleon's dismissal of the idéologues and Marx and Engels's critique in The German Ideology into a term denoting distorted consciousness in service of class interest. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, liberalism, conservatism, socialism, nationalism, fascism, and communism crystallised as competing programs for organising political order, each with its own intellectual genealogy and claims to universality. Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, the Frankfurt School's critique of mass culture, and Cold War-era 'end of ideology' debates by Daniel Bell and Raymond Aron made the study of ideology central to twentieth-century political thought. With the collapse of state socialism in 1989-91, Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' thesis briefly suggested liberal democracy as the terminus of ideological contest, but the subsequent rise of political Islam, resurgent nationalisms, illiberal democracy, and techno-authoritarianism has reopened questions about the durability of any single ordering ideology. Recent intellectual history has emphasised the transnational circulation of ideologies, the role of think tanks and intellectual networks (such as the Mont Pèlerin Society in shaping neoliberalism), and the recovery of non-Western ideological traditions, prompting renewed debate over how ideas translate into institutional and international order.

Key players

Legal Orders and Normative Innovation

The history of legal order is inseparable from the intellectual labour of jurists, theologians, and philosophers who have continually reinvented the sources, scope, and authority of law. Roman law and its medieval rediscovery, the canon law tradition, the Salamanca School's reflections on the law of nations during Spanish colonial expansion, and Grotius's De Jure Belli ac Pacis laid foundations for modern conceptions of natural and international law. Enlightenment codification projects—from the Prussian ALR to the Napoleonic Code—rationalised domestic legal orders, while nineteenth-century positivism, German historical jurisprudence, and the rise of legal science reframed law as a self-contained system. The twentieth century witnessed dramatic normative innovations: the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg principles, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the law of the sea, and the emergence of international criminal and environmental law. Scholars such as Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt, H.L.A. Hart, and more recently Martti Koskenniemi and Samuel Moyn have debated whether these innovations represent genuine moral progress, ideological cover for hegemony, or contingent products of specific intellectual milieus. Today, debates over the legality of humanitarian intervention, climate obligations, digital governance, and the decolonisation of international law continue to test the capacity of legal thought to generate normatively persuasive responses to global challenges.

Key players

Empire, Civilisation, and International Order

Modern international order was forged in dialogue with empire. From the sixteenth-century Iberian debates over the rights of indigenous peoples through the Westphalian settlement, the Concert of Europe, and the nineteenth-century 'standard of civilisation' that conditioned admission to international society, the language of civilisation served both to justify imperial expansion and to delimit who counted as a sovereign actor. Thinkers from Vitoria, Las Casas, and Pufendorf to John Stuart Mill, Henry Maine, and James Lorimer articulated hierarchies of peoples that structured law, diplomacy, and economic relations across the colonial world. The twentieth-century decolonisation wave, the Bandung Conference, and the New International Economic Order challenged these hierarchies, while postcolonial intellectual historians—Edward Said, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Antony Anghie, Adom Getachew—have traced how civilisational categories persisted in transmuted form within development discourse, human rights, and the liberal international order. Contemporary debates over 'civilisation-states,' the rise of China and India, Russian appeals to a multipolar civilisational order, and Western responses to global power shifts have reactivated nineteenth-century vocabularies in twenty-first-century contexts, making the intellectual history of empire and civilisation acutely relevant to current geopolitics.

Key players

Knowledge and Classification

Systems of knowledge classification—encyclopaedias, taxonomies, archives, statistics, and disciplines—are never neutral mirrors of reality but historically situated technologies that organise power as much as information. From Aristotle's categorisation of beings and the medieval ordering of the trivium and quadrivium to Linnaean taxonomy, Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, and the disciplinary formation of the modern university, classification has shaped what counts as legitimate knowledge and who counts as a legitimate knower. Foucault's analyses in The Order of Things and the Archaeology of Knowledge, together with sociologists of science such as Bruno Latour and historians like Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, have made the historical contingency of epistemic order a central concern. The rise of statistics, censuses, racial taxonomies, and colonial archives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries demonstrated how classification underwrote state-building, empire, and biopolitics, while the twentieth century saw the emergence of new ordering devices from international standards and library classifications to databases. Today, debates over algorithmic classification, indigenous and decolonial knowledge systems, open science, and the politics of metadata have given the intellectual history of classification renewed urgency, as scholars examine how new digital infrastructures reproduce or disrupt older epistemic hierarchies.

Key players

Medicine and the Body Politic

The analogy between the human body and the political community is among the oldest and most generative tropes in Western and non-Western political thought, from Plato and the Pauline corpus through John of Salisbury's Policraticus and Hobbes's Leviathan with its anatomical frontispiece. Early modern medicine, humoral theory, and emerging public health practices supplied vocabularies that statesmen and theorists deployed to diagnose social ills, justify intervention, and imagine collective health. Quarantine regimes, lazarettos, and responses to plague helped shape early modern state capacity and ideas of sovereignty. From the eighteenth century onward, the consolidation of clinical medicine, statistics, and public hygiene—analysed by Foucault as biopolitics and by historians such as George Rosen and Erwin Ackerknecht—linked medical authority to projects of population management, colonial governance, and racial science. The twentieth century brought social medicine, the founding of the WHO, the eugenics movement and its repudiation, and global campaigns against smallpox, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis. The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically revived debates over the relationship between medical expertise, political authority, and individual liberty, while contemporary concerns over mental health, reproductive rights, pandemic preparedness, and global health equity continue to make the metaphor and practice of the body politic central to intellectual history.

Key players

Resources

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Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Turkey September 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

International Society for Intellectual History Conference 2026 (ISIH 2026)

Sep 18–20, 2026Istanbul, TurkeyIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Intellectual Histories of (Dis)order · Ideologies and Order · Legal Orders and Normative Innovation · Empire, Civilisation, and International Order · Knowledge and Classification · Medicine and the Body Politic

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Türkiye

Host country and a historical nexus of intellectual exchange.

Role in topic

United Kingdom

Significant contributor to intellectual history scholarship.

Role in topic

Germany

Strong tradition in historical and philosophical inquiry.

Role in topic

United States

Diverse and influential academic contributions.

Role in topic