Premodern Studies Colloquium Annual Report 2007-2008
Submitted to the Center for the Humanities at Temple University
By
Professors Kathleen Biddick (History) and Shannon Miller (English)
The Pre-Modern Studies Colloquium was first organized in the Fall Semester of 2005. Kathleen Biddick (History) and Shannon Miller (English) in collaboration with Richard Immerman (Director of the Center of the Humanities) hosted a reception for faculty and graduate students engaged in Pre-Modern Studies at Temple University. Our current membership is composed of over 30 faculty and 16 graduate students,representing three colleges and seven departments.
We are particularly interested in how the historic formation of the different humanistic disciplines (art history, classics, history, literature, music, philosophy) shapes the temporal borders of what traditionally counts as ancient, medieval, and early modern. We argue that "we have never been modern," until we understand the genealogical ways in which powerful categories of sovereignty, political theology, archive, rationality, coloniality, gender, race, and power operated discursively across the perceived divides of periodization and the alleged theological imaginaries of Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
During the academic year 2007-08 our activities centered about the theme of sovereignty, erotics, and gender. Our application to the CLA Conference Award competition was successful and we opened the academic year with a “mini-conference” on “The Erotics of Sovereignty.” Held on September 7th, our extraordinarily successful one day conference combined two speakers from outside of Temple – Professor Cristelle Baskins from the Art History department at Tufts and Geraldine Heng from Medieval Studies at UT Austin – and three speakers from Temple, Dan Ellis from English, Rita Krueger from History, and Noah Shusterman from Intellectual Heritage. The conference, which drew faculty and grad students from Temple, Penn, Princeton, and St. John’s College, was a great success. All funding for the event came from the CLA Dean’s Office and co-sponsorship from the Departments of Philosophy, Art (Tyler College), History and English. We received no monetary support for the conference from the Humanities center.
We then followed this up a “Roundtable on Early Modern Queens” on November 1, 2007. Two faculty, Montserrat Piera and Rita Krueger, and our own dean Teresa Soufas spoke on queens who reigned from the 14th through the 18th century. A wonderful follow-up to our conference on the Erotics of Sovereignty, this informal gathering gave us chance to hear about the research of our colloquium members while considering the cross-national and cross-disciplinary implications of gender and sovereignty in the early modern period.
The pre-modern colloquium then took a strategic step towards promotion of pre-modern studies and research at Temple University and beyond by mounting a comprehensive website on Temple’s site. Designed by Adam Miyashiro, our website features the following information: 1) listing of academic events; 2) membership list (of which we count 51 members); 3) an extensive listing of regional and national resources on pre-modern materials; 4) an archive of our conference programs and other relevant materials; 5) our mission statement. The website of the Premodern Studies Colloquium has enabled us to communicate with our members, to advertise upcoming events or lectures of interest to premodern members, and continue our goals of promoting pre-modern work at Temple University. See the website at http://www.temple.edu/humanities/premodern. This website supplements our listserv which we update each Fall semester to reflect the arrival of new faculty and instructors at Temple.
Unfortunately, after initially having the website posted on the CHAT homepage, it was removed by the Interim Director, Peter Logan, and has not be reposted there despite the requests by the co-organizers of the Pre-modern colloquium and an official proposal to have it reinstated there. This is unfortunate because CHAT should be our most obvious “home.” Thanks to cooperative department chairs, we are now listed on the Classics, English, History, and Philosophy web pages, and will soon be listed on the Religion, Spanish, and CLA pages.
Our Spring 2008 activities focused first on our graduate students and then began preparations for 2008-2009. On March 20, 2008 we convened a graduate student roundtable in the CHAT lounge. Graduate students who are working on their dissertations were invited to provide a 5-7 minute sketch of their project, including some of the main research questions, as well as roadblocks, they were encountering in their work so far. Five graduate students presented and discussed their projects with fellow graduate students and premodern faculty.
On May 1st, our reading group met to read selections from the edited collection "Mystifying the Monarch"; this volume allowed us to continue our conversation in the colloquium about the role of, and the problematics of, sovereignty in the pre- and early modern periods. To read more about this book, see http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/226178.ctl Four of the books were paid for by CHAT; 5 other copies were purchased by contributing departments. The total monetary contribution to the colloquium by CHAT in 2007-2008 was $185.
The Premodern Studies Colloquium succeeded again in securing funding from the CLA Conference Competition. Our FALL 2008 conference is on the following topic: Premodern Sovereignties and the Discourses of Political Theology and Biopolitics.
The Schedule for the conference follows. The conference will be held in CHAT, but all monies for the conference came from the CLA Dean’s office and contributing departments (English, History, Religion, Center for Afro-Jewish Studies)
PREMODERN SOVEREIGNTIES and
THE DISCOURSES OF POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND BIOPOLITICS
PROGRAM SCHEDULE
Friday, September 5, 2008
Center for the Humanities, 10th floor of Gladfelter Hall
10:45 AM Opening Remarks
Dean Teresa Scott Soufas, College of Liberal Arts
11:00-12:00
Political Theology Inside Out: Waman Puma and Ottobah Cugoano Decolonial Sovereignty
Walter D. Mignolo, William H. Wannmaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies
Duke University
Moderator: Lewis Gordon (Center for African-Jewish Studies-Temple)
12:00-12:45 box lunch -CHAT Lounge
1:00-2:00
Periodization, Secularization, Sovereignty
Kathleen Davis (English-U. of Rhode Island)
Moderator: Shannon Miller (English-Temple)
2:00-400
Fabricating Arthur’s Two Bodies: Sovereignty as a Mode of Temporality
Kathleen Biddick (History-Temple)
Edward II's Bare Life
Adam Miyashiro (English-Temple)
Moderator: Vasiliki Limberis (Religion-Temple)
4:00-4:30 Coffee Break
4:30-5:30
The Wizards of Uz: Shakespeare, the Book of Job, and the Travails of Universalism
Julia Reinhard Lupton (English and Comparative Literature-UC-Irvine)
Moderator: Nichole Miller (English-Temple)
5:45-6:45 Reception CHAT lounge
7:30 Symposium Restaurant Meal
