For all too long, waiting has lingered below the threshold of our historical perception. Despite the fact that “waiting is … a key dimension of modernity,” as Craig Jeffrey claims, it “is a temporal region hardly mapped and badly documented” (Harold Schweizer). The moment has come to delve into how those who waited increased their awareness of time as well as of themselves and their place in the world. By bringing waiting in history to the fore, this proect seeks to lead the debate on time away from the existential themes that have dominated its exploration. This first foray into this new terrain is therefore less interested in the final truths about time’s essence than in the temporal poetics of the everyday.

Free and open to the public.