Early Modern Worlds, Colonialism, and Imperial Reason

Our faculty works across the wide range of historical periods and cultural configurations that characterize feudal Europe, the age of colonial capitalism, and the early period of modern secularization. Our scholars of the medieval period account for the environmental transitions from Roman hegemony to early medieval Europe and the concomitant cultural and political fragmentation therein; the study of technology and resource transformations in the medieval Mediterranean; communications between languages and literary traditions in the medieval Mediterranean—especially Arabic, Latin and Romance vernaculars; the cultural and political multiplicity of, and translation among, Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the Iberian Peninsula prior to and following the Christian Reconquista of Iberia; Classical reception studies, systems of thought in medieval French and Catalan literature, medieval forms of sovereign power and posthuman approaches to the French medieval period, and portrayals of gender transition and transformation in medieval Europe through the lens of modern transgender theory.

Our scholars of the emergent national-imperial (‘Colonial’/‘Golden’/‘Renaissance’) age open up feudal Europe to the study of Europe’s North Atlantic commercial and military operations and their ever-expanding imperial frontiers. They study the colonial infrastructures of racial categories, racialized subjectivities, and theories of race history; settler colonialism and indigenous forms of territorialization in the Indies and modern Americas; science, technology, and the medical humanities in the Great Books tradition of the Iberian imperial age; the modern emergence of republican universalism and secularism; and the southern European recuperations of medieval Mediterranean Islamic/Christian traditions in the formation of national ideologies.

Faculty: García Santo-Tomás, Gutt, Hoffmann, Mallette, McCracken, Nemser, Squatriti, Szpiech, Verdesio.