What is the Temple Pre-Modern Studies Colloquium?

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. For more information about these mini-conferences, symposia and papers, click on Archive.

In 2008-09 we will continue to explore questions of sovereignty with a mini-conference on Sovereignty, Embodiment and Periodization. For the tentative program click on Forthcoming Events.

Aims of the Pre-Modern Colloquium

• Foster regular scholarly exchange and interdisciplinary conversation among faculty and graduate students across the humanities.

• Organize scholarly events such as symposia and conferences.

• Maintain a reading group under the auspices of CHAT (Center for the Humanities at Temple).

• Run works-in-progress sessions for graduate students and faculty.

• Encourage the development of and flourishing of pre-modern studies at Temple, in scholarship, in tenure-track hiring, in undergraduate and graduate offerings, and in the development of undergraduate research opportunities, and in deepening Temple participation in regional consortia, such as the Folger Institute.