The intimate relationship between global European expansion since the early modern period and the concurrent beginnings of the scientific revolution has long been acknowledged. The contributions in this volume approach the entanglement of science and cultural encounters - many of them in colonial Settings - from a variety of perspectives. Historical and historiographical survey essays sketch a transcultural history of knowledge and conduct a critical dialogue between the recent academic fields of Postcolonial Studies and Science & Empire Studies; a Series of case studies explores the topos of Europe's 'great inventions', the scientific exploitation of culturally unfamiliar people and objects, the representation of indigenous cultures in discourses of geographical exploration, as well as non-European scientific practices. 'Entangled Knowledges' also refers to the critical practices of scholarship: various essays investigate scholarship's own failures in self-reflexivity, arising from an uncritical appropriation of cultural stereotypes and colonial myths, of which the discourse of Orientalism in historiography and residual racialist assumptions in modern genetics serve as examples. The volume thus contributes to the study of cultural and colonial relations as well as to the history of science and scholarship.

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Gesa Mackenthun is Professor of American Studies at RoStock University, Germany. Her publications include Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature (2004), Metaphors of Dispossession. American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637 (1997), and Sea Changes. Historicizing the Ocean (co-edited with Bernhard Klein, 2004). In 2006, she founded the graduate school "Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship" at RoStock University (German Research Foundation) and has co-edited seven research volumes on various aspects of this problematic (including Entangled Knowledge. Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference, 2012, and Fugitive Knowledge, 2015). Her current research deals with nineteenth-century travel and archaeology and the scientific construction of American antiquity.

Overall, the collection should be of great interest to scholars working on cultural and colonial relations, and the history of science. While its broad scope and multidisciplinarity will make it attractive to a wide Audience especially as a teaching tool [...] – Anita Kurimay in: European Review of History/Revue europeenne d'histoire, Vol. 20, Issue 4, 2013

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