Global Shapes of Knowledge: Towards a History of Research

Valentina Arena is Professor of Ancient History at University College London. Her work focuses on the history of ancient ideas and ancient political thought as well as the wider intellectual landscape of the Roman Republic, with a particular interest in the fields of Roman antiquarianism. She is currently leading an international project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) entitled ‘Ordering, Constructing, Empowering: Fragments of the Roman Republican Antiquarians,’ which aims at establishing the first edition of the antiquarian texts of the Roman Republic.

John W. Boyer is the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago. From 1992 to 2023 he served as Dean of the College. He is currently Senior Advisor to the President of the University. He is the author of five books, including most recently The University of Chicago: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Austria 1867-1955 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2022). The latter book is part of the Oxford History of Modern Europe series. He is presently at work on a book on Religion and Politics in Modern Europe, 1789-1960 for Princeton University Press.

Guangchen Chen (陳廣琛) is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at Emory University. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature with a secondary field in Music from Harvard University. He was previously a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows where he taught across departments including Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, and German. He is interested in topics broadly concerning the intersection of literary, material, and musical cultures. His book manuscript, Thing Lost, Thing Regain: Antiquarian Collecting and Chinese Modernity, currently under review, investigates antiquarian collecting as a conceptual and methodological intervention into the formation of Chinese modernity.

Whitney Cox’s main interests are in the literary and intellectual history of southern India in the early second millennium CE, with a recurrent focus on its connections with the history of the valley of Kashmir, in the far northwest of the Indian subcontinent.  His past and current research concentrates on Sanskrit kāvya literature and poetic theory, the history of the Śaiva religion, and medieval Tamil literature and epigraphy, especially that of the Coḻa dynastic state.  He is the author of Modes of Philology in Medieval South India (Brill 2017; Primus 2020) and Politics, Kingship, and Poetry in Medieval South India: Moonset on Sunrise Mountain (Cambridge, 2016).  Forthcoming books include and edition and translation of Bilhaṇa’s Vikramāṅkadevacarita, a volume of the first complete translation of Kampaṉ’s Tamil Rāmāyaṇam, and a contribution to early second millennium intellectual history, tentatively entitled Two Brahmanisms.

Philip J. Deloria is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, and the author Playing Indian, Indians in Unexpected Places, and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract. Deloria received the Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University and has taught at the University of Colorado and the University of Michigan. He has been a long-serving trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, president of the American Studies Association and the Organization of American Historians and is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Constanze Güthenke is a Hellenist and Comparatist. Since 2014 she has been Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Oxford. Before that, from 2002 to 2014, she was Assistant and then Associate Professor of Classics and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. She is a founding member of the collaborative group The Postclassicism Collective. Her main research area is the modern knowledge of antiquity; her main strategy is to read scholarly texts as literature. Her most recent monograph Feeling and Classical Philology: Knowing Antiquity in German Scholarship, 1770-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) attempts a critical reading of the intersection between the romantic discourse of feeling and the imagery of professional philology. Her emphasis is on the situatedness of knowledge and its forms of expression, especially in light of international transfers. She has published another monograph on romantic philhellenism and modern Greek literature (2008), as well as pieces on questions of hermeneutics, on ancient and modern biography, and on exemplarity as a form of reading. She currently works on a project on the history of Classics in America since 1800. Her aim is to open up the complex historical traingulation between America, Europe, and antiquity, and to claim that in this space disorientation is both a fundamental element of disciplinary practice, but also a term with significance for future disciplinary narratives and self-understanding.

Catherine Hezser is Professor of Jewish Studies at SOAS, University of London. After receiving her PhD in Ancient Judaism at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York she was a senior research fellow at King’s College, Cambridge and taught at the Free University Berlin, Trinity College Dublin, and SOAS, University of London. She was a visiting professor at the Hebrew University Jerusalem and the University of Oslo. Her main research focus are the history, literature, and culture of Jews in Roman Palestine in late antiquity in the context of Graeco-Roman and Byzantine-Christian societies. Amongst her major book publications are The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine (1997), Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (2001), Jewish Slavery in Antiquity (2005), Jewish Travel in Antiquity (2011), Rabbinic Body Language (2017), and The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine (2010). More recently, she has published a number of articles on ancient rabbis as intellectuals. Her new monograph,  Rabbinic Scholarship in the Context of Late Antique Scholasticism, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury and an edited volume, The Routledge Handbook of Jews and Judaism in Late Antiquity with Routledge (both 2024). She just started a new collaborative and externally funded research project on “Rabbinic Civil Law in the Context of Ancient Legal History”, with the goal of creating a Legal Compendium to the Talmud Yerushalmi.

Vera Keller is Professor and Chair of History at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575-1725 (Cambridge, 2015), The Interlopers: Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge (Hopkins, 2023), and Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century (forthcoming from Cambridge). Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the ACLS, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other awards.

André Laks, born 1950, was taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, at the Sorbonne and at the University of Lille. He was professor of Greek and of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Lille, at Princeton University, and at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. Since his retirement in 2011, he has been teaching at the Universidad Panamericana, Ciudad de México, D.F.

Federico Marcon is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University. He is a social historian of ideas, interested in the social, intellectual, and semiotic processes of knowledge formation. He investigated the practices of nature knowledge in Tokugawa Japan in The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (2015) and now on historians’ knowledge of “fascism” in A History of “Fascism”: A Study on Historical Knowledge (in production, Chicago).

Research and Mobility in Modern Africa

Francesca Rochberg is Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emerita in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley.  She is an Assyriologist and historian of science specializing in Babylonian astronomical and astrological texts and related traditions. She is the author of Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and a new monograph under submission titled Reflections on Worldmaking: Historiography and Anthropology of Cuneiform Sciences (Cambridge University Press).

Alessandra Russo is Professor and Chair of the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. Her research studies the theory, practice and display of the arts in the early modern times with a special emphasis on the artistic dynamics in the context of the Iberian colonization. She is author of A New Antiquity. Art and Humanity as Universal. 1400-1600 (forthcoming with Penn State University Press), The Untranslatable Image (Texas University Press and published in French with Les presses du réel) El realismo circular (UNAM, México, 2005) and editor with Gerhard Wolf and Diana Fane of: Images Take Flight (Hirmer Verlag, 2015). She directs with Michael Cole the project Spanish Italy and the Iberian Americas sponsored by the Getty Foundation. Her new book manuscript is entitled The Great Custodian. Aesthetic Education with Sebastiano Biavati.

Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on Social Thought.

Ahmed El Shamsy is professor of Islamic thought in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law.

Hiroyuki Suzuki is Professor Emeritus of Tokyo Gakugei University and Director of Toyama Memorial Museum. He studies Japanese art history and is presently preparing a book on history of forming “Japanese art history” in the Meiji period. His books include Antiquarians of Nineteenth-Century Japan: The Archaeology of Things in the Late Tokugawa and Early Meiji Periods (2022), Meisho fuzoku-zu (Genre paintings of famous places) (2007), and Kano Hideyori hitsu Takao kanpu-zu byobu: Kioku no katachi (Maple viewing at Takao by Kano Hideyori: A shape of memory) (1994).

Rosalind Thomas is Professor of Ancient Greek History and teaching Fellow of Ancient History at Balliol College Oxford. She has worked extensively on literacy and orality in ancient Greece, and has written Oral Tradition and Written Record in Ancient Athens (1989) and Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (1992). She has interests in Greek law, Greek relations with the Persian Empire, and more specifically for this lecture, she wrote a book on Herodotus: Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge 2000): this examined among other things, the way Herodotus’ Histories shows influence from and interaction with some of the ideas and methods of early Greek science in the late fifth century B.C. She also works on Thucydides, other types of historiography, particularly local histories (Polis Histories and Collective Memories in the Greek World, 2019), and more recently on archaic Lydia and the Greeks.

Chad Wellmon is Professor of German Studies, with appointments in History and Media Studies, at the University of Virginia. He has written or edited books on the history of anthropology, the modern research university, the history of reading and print, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Max Weber. became visible to readers over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His latest book, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, was published last year. He is currently completing After the University.

Duygu Yıldırım is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee. She works on comparative and connected histories of the Ottoman Empire and early modern Europe.