2012-13 Faculty Seminar Grant Recipients

Feeling in the Middle Ages

Faculty Conveners: Daniel Bornstein, Professor of History and Religious Studies; Ahmet Karamustafa, Professor of History; Religious Studies; and Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; Jessica Rosenfeld, Assistant Professor of English; Julie Singer, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures

The Feeling in the Middle Ages Faculty Seminar has grown out of two successive reading groups for faculty and graduate students funded by the Center for the Humanities: Medieval Courtly Culture (2010-2011) and Medieval Clerical Culture (2011-2012). The reading groups have been successful in drawing graduate students and faculty from across the humanities at Washington University, along with interested participants from neighboring institutions and local independent scholars. Beginning in Fall 2012, the group will conduct a more intensively focused seminar on the topic of feeling in the Middle Ages. This topic encompasses a number of currently flourishing fields of study: disability studies, the history of the body, the history of affect, gender and religious devotion, material culture, and lyric subjectivity. Each semester the seminar will read foundational secondary scholarship, a work-in-progress by a seminar member, and a work by a visiting speaker. Fall readings will focus on medieval constructs of cognition and sensation, the history of melancholy and mental illness, and the applicability of contemporary Disability Studies methodologies to medieval materials. Spring readings will address discourse of emotion in medieval ethics, mysticism and penitential literature.

 

Muslim/Christian Encounters in the Pre-modern Mediterranean

Faculty Conveners: Ahmet Karamustafa, Professor of History; Religious Studies; and Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; Christine Johnson, Associate Professor History; and Mathieu Grenet, Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow in the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities

Religious diversity was a defining characteristic of Mediterranean societies, even as the region was politically divided between Islamdom and Christendom. People of different faiths were brought together through settlement, trade, diplomacy, war, and slavery. From the Spanish reconquista to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople to the merchant colonies dotting the shorelines and islands, to numerous travelers, soldiers, and captives, Christians and Muslims negotiated the challenges and opportunities of religious difference. From these encounters, as well as the anxieties they produced, dialogues arose within and across religious communities, as religious specialists, poets and playwrights, political elites, and the diverse actors engaged in cross-cultural contact worked to establish the meaning of religious difference. The Muslim/Christian Encounters in the Pre-modern Mediterranean Faculty Seminar will operate in conjunction with two advanced courses that explore these issues: History 4503: Captives, Slaves, Converts and Renegades in the Early Modern Mediterranean and History 4210: Christians and Muslims in the Mediterranean World, 1100-1650. The seminar will conduct three meetings per semester and explore such themes as the nature of religious identity, the common culture of religious difference, and conversion and the public sphere.

 

Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon

Faculty Conveners: Rebecca Messbarger, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Tili Boon Cuillé, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures

The Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon, founded in 1997, is a faculty works-in-progress group that meets once a month throughout the academic year and invites a prestigious guest speaker on an annual basis. Though its discussions all pertain to the long eighteenth century, the topics addressed vary as widely as its members’ current interests and areas of expertise. The Salon has investigated fundamental questions such as the changing definition of Nature, God, and the Enlightenment itself, both at the time and in the critical reception of the period. Salon sessions address topics as diverse and yet interrelated as mysticism and mechanism, sensibility and surplus value, painting and the press. The Salon is a text-based reading group that circulates members’ works-in-progress in advance. The author offers some valuable contextualizing remarks at the beginning of each discussion, after which participants engage in a probing interdisciplinary conversation, asking insightful questions and offering constructive written and oral comments that aim both to enhance understanding of the subject and to improve the quality of the work.