NEH Summer Institute: June 26th – July 21st, 2023
Saint Louis University
St. Louis, Missouri
Saint Louis University is pleased to announce “Global Geographies of Knowledge: Creating, Representing, and Commodifying Ideas across Early Modern Places (1400–1800),” a four-week summer institute for higher-education faculty which will take place from June 26th through July 21st, 2023. “Global Geographies of Knowledge” focuses on the fluid processes of encountering and transmitting ideas about peoples and objects in physical and imaginary landscapes. Conversely, this Institute also analyzes how such ideas affected the human and nonhuman relations with specific sites and environments. We seek to bring together higher education faculty and advanced PhD students from around the country to deepen their knowledge and research using critical ways of thinking spatially in the humanities and social sciences and to develop innovative ways of applying them to themes in world history and cultures of knowledge in the classroom. To foster this inquiry, the institute directors have invited eight renowned guest faculty from diverse humanistic disciplines to lead master classes and deliver themed lectures. In addition to these sessions, participants will pursue a project connecting their research and/or teaching to institute themes. The institute’s 30 participants will make regular use of the collections and spaces of the university’s libraries and special collections, as well as local partner institutions including the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Jesuit Archives and Research Center. The institute will be held on Saint Louis University’s beautiful North Campus located in Midtown St. Louis and adjacent to the city’s vibrant Arts District.
Directors of the Institute
Claire Gilbert is a historian who specializes in the social history of translation and the political consequences of language contact in the Western Mediterranean in the early modern period. She is the author of In Good Faith: Arabic Translation and Translators in Early Modern Spain, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2020.
Fabien Montcher is a social historian of knowledge and politics from the 15th-18th centuries with emphasis on the Iberian world. His book entitled Mercenaries of Knowledge: Vicente Nogueira, the Republic of Letters, and Late Renaissance Politics is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2023.
Charles Parker is a historian of early modern European and world history. His latest book is Global Calvinism: Conversion and Commerce in the Dutch Empire, 1600-1800, published by Yale University Press in 2022.
The Global Geographies of Knowledge Summer Institute has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed on this website, or in materials associated with this Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.