This roundtable discussion will consider the future of intellectual history in light of the global and decolonial turn of the discipline in recent years, and the opportunities opened up by its increasingly tenuous and confused place in the academic landscape. Drawing on recent developments in the field since Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori’s Global Intellectual History in 2013 and the creation in 2016 of the journal Global Intellectual History, panelists with a range of geographic and methodological approaches to intellectual history will take up the question ‘where does intellectual history go from here?’ and the many underlying questions it invites: is ‘global intellectual history’ the most generative and fruitful lens through which intellectual history might continue to open up? do we operate with limited (and limiting) criteria for what constitutes a text or an idea worthy of intellectual historical examination, and if so how might we best open up those lines of thought? what problems arise with this term ‘global,’ and with seeing the development of ‘global intellectual history’ as constituting a rupture with what was previously done? what is gained, and what lost when we re-read European thinkers in trans-imperial contexts of (racial, political, economic) oppression and exploitation? ought we to see the past few decades as the moment in which global intellectual history began to blossom, and how does the nature of what the turn to ‘global intellectual history’ signifies change when we reinterpret the moment at which this turn to the ‘global’ came about?

The discussion will focus not just on the more theoretical challenges of methodology and orientation that the future of intellectual history invites, and the direction intellectual history should take, but also on the more material changes to the discipline those challenges might bring. As history programs continue to be decolonized across all levels of education, for example, intellectual history might provide a way around the impediments of geographic and temporal scope that often limit the structuring of curricula, opening up programs structured around particular ideas and arenas of thought, with wide-ranging possibilities for new modes of teaching, hiring, researching, and publishing. Similarly, the development in recent years of an array of centers and journals addressing the ‘history of knowledge’ suggests that intellectual history might serve as a connective tissue between history departments and the wider intellectual (and scientific) world, or possess parallel fields of intellectual work that already extend well beyond academia. Thus we hope that historians from all areas of historical enterprise, of even a nebulous relation to intellectual history, will join us to discuss these questions, and to reimagine intellectual history as it continues to transmogrify and evolve.