Add the event Illusion: Travels to the Past as Deceptive Illusion. A meeting with Prof. Avner Wishnitzer to the calendar
Illusion: Travels to the Past as Deceptive Illusion. A meeting with Prof. Avner Wishnitzer
The first meeting in a new series – dialogues with researchers who have written essays on various aspects of illusion in their fields of research, as appeared in the 2026 edition of ‘Poetry of Science’, a periodical published once a year concurrently with the Weizmann Institute’s annual Ofer Lider prize for encouraging creative writing among scientists award ceremony. The editor of ‘Poetry of Science’ is Idan Barir, a translator of poetry and prose from Portuguese, Arabic, English, and Turkish.
"All history is contemporary history, according to Italian historian Benedetto Croce. Any representation of the past (including those inescapable academic history research papers) is shaped by the reality within which it is created; it reflects prevalent beliefs, ideologies, hidden assumptions, writing strategies, and more. The difference between Travels to the Past and history in its academic sense is that historians are expected to be aware of the contemporary nature of their writings.” (Avner Wishnitzer)
Public discourse often raises the possibility of simultaneously returning to a glorious past and the greatness of a nation. Prof. Avner Wishnitzer and Idan Barir discuss the credibility, the validity, and the glory of that past, and the question of whether this past, which can ostensibly be visited or returned to, is indeed the one that historians refer to in their historical research.
Prof. Avner Wishnitzer – Historian, author, translator, Head of the Middle Eastern and African History Department at Tel Aviv University, and co-chair (with Prof. On Barak) of the Laboratory for the Histories of Climate Change at Tel Aviv University's Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies
The series is sponsored by the Braginsky Center for the Interface between Science and Humanities.
Schedule:
16/2 Travels to the Past as Deceptive Illusion, with Prof. Avner Wishnitzer
16/3 The Placebo Effect, with Prof. Asya Rolls
18/5 The Psychedelic Renaissance, with Prof. Shauli Lev-Ran
22/6 Phantom Pains, with Dr. Uri Hochberg
