Current Workshops: 2011-12

How exactly does language work? How does it interact with the other cognitive processes that shape the human experience? The investigation of language and thought includes a number of disciplines, including linguistics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and computer science. This workshop encourages and facilitates communication among these diverse approaches to the study of the same central question, focusing on particular topics at the cutting edge of this broad area of research.

Human language is an incredibly powerful tool for communication. Communicative inferences – feats of reasoning that connect what is said with what is meant, using information from shared context – are a fundamental topic for scholars across a broad range of fields. This workshop aims to establish a joint vocabulary among linguists, philosophers, and psychologists about shared reference and context.

Bringing together scholars from different disciplines with interests in ancient and modern moral and political thought, this workshop explores the possibilities for reuniting classical and classically-influenced ideas about ethics (especially the ethics of virtue) with political theorizing that is applicable to the modern world.

The Middle East and Central Asia constitute an interregional zone defined by a great variety of interlinked local cultures, economies, and ecologies. The workshop intends to approach issues of minorities, religious communities, rights and democracy with attention to historical depth and cultural specificity, as well as contemporary geopolitics.

From centuries-old Japanese woodblock prints and political cartoons to manga, superhero serials, comics journalism and webcomics, pictures and words have been brought together by visionary artists who saw the potential to tell stories of human civilization in ways not possible via text or image alone. GNP looks at the many manifestations of this genre.

Explaining conscious experience crosses the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, literature, physics, law, and cognitive science. The workshop will explore this phenomenon that each of us knows intimately well by looking at three topics: pain experience, the problem of color, and the promise and peril of enhanced consciousness and sensory implants.

This workshop brings together scholars from a variety of humanistic disciplines to re-examine the role (and persistence) of religious representations, concepts, and doctrines in modern and contemporary culture, literature, and philosophy. It investigates such topics as a renewed interest in theories of secularization and the ostensible arrival of a post-secular age; the philosophical appropriation and criticism of existential and ethical themes originating in the religions; and the role religious ideas and discourse continue to play in politics. The title of the workshop expresses the wager that the mythos of religion is not without its logos.

PRG meets weekly to discuss philosophical texts chosen in advance. Graduate students and faculty present and analyze philosophical work, and graduate students have the opportunity to relate their own research to philosophical questions raised by the text.

The Enlightenment and Revolution workshop crosses national boundaries and disciplines by bringing together a variety of eighteenth-century scholars with different research interests and methods to investigate an extremely rich historical period, with a focus on the categories of “Enlightenment” and “Revolution.”

This working group focuses on developing a common methodological paradigm for doing comparative literary scholarship of the Americas. It seeks to move beyond the national (especially U.S.) and regional (especially Latin American) paradigms toward a transnational hemispheric literary and historical discussion.

VVLAR will take as its focus the practice and performance of cultural literacy in the Ancient Roman world – interpretations of verbal and visual objects ranging from elevated poems to scurrilous graffiti, from weighty civic monuments to provocative personal paintings. Using archaeology, history, philology, philosophy, and – of course – classics, the workshop will explore the Romans’ interpretive activities as they interacted with the private and public spaces of their cities.

This workshop brings together humanists engaged in visualization projects with experts from the fields of geography, cartography, communication design, the visual arts, and computer science to look at visual techniques as scholarly method. Using these projects as case studies, the workshop will look for ways to convey the complexity and nuance of humanistic modes of inquiry.

How can scholars theorize the novel at a time when novel studies are being rescaled both toward less canonical European and American texts and toward novels outside American and European contexts? The group asks how literary aspects of novels are shaped by extra-literary contexts, how to conceptualize the history and geography of the novel, and how novels are related to other genres and media.

The Workshop in Poetics is concerned with the theoretical and practical dimensions of the reading and criticism of poetry. This workshop is especially focused on poetics as an arena for theory and interpretive practice, and historical poetics as a particular set of challenges for the reader and scholar.