Interdisciplinary Graduate Workshops

Made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Mahindra Humanities Center interdisciplinary workshops, open to Harvard graduate students in all departments and programs, are intended to foster discussion of important areas of study that often cross departmental boundaries. While the workshops are especially focused on dissertation work, they will include periodic discussion of general issues and questions. Harvard graduate students at all levels of study, from the first year of graduate school to the dissertation stage, are encouraged to attend. Workshop meetings will include: discussions of chapters and works-in-progress, research areas, theoretical questions of general interest, current issues in the field, and professional development.

To join a workshop or to receive more information about a workshop, please contact the graduate student coordinator(s).

Hegelian Identities
Faculty Director: Gordon Teskey (English)
Graduate Student Coordinator: William Baldwin, wbaldwin@fas.harvard.edu

Hegelian Identities focuses on structural problems underlying such contemporary practices in the humanities as interdisciplinarity and hybridity. These are forms of combining identities or transitioning from one kind of identity to another. Humanities scholars performing these operations are often unaware of the dialectical tradition underlying them. In the coming year the workshop will have two parts: one investigating the dialectical tradition in the twentieth century, the other examining Heidegger's Being and Time as a novel reinterpretation of the problem of identity and nonidentity in Hegel.

Medieval Studies Interdisciplinary Workshop
Faculty Directors: Nicholas Watson (English)
Graduate Student Coordinators: Julian Yolles,jyolles@fas.harvard.edu; John Zaleski, jzaleski@fas.harvard.edu

The Medieval Studies Workshop fosters intellectual community among graduate students in different fields of historical study relating to medieval Europe through the exchange of ideas, information, and methodologies. The present format of the workshop emphasizes regular meetings with faculty and scholars in the Harvard community; discussion of texts, images, and objects of essential value to all students of the medieval period; and the practice of using Harvard’s medieval research resources. Participants are also encouraged to attend the Mahindra Humanities Center Medieval Seminar.

The Political Economy of Modern Capitalism
Faculty Directors: Sven Beckert (History), Christine Desan (Harvard Law School)
Graduate Student Coordinator: Caitlin Rosenthal, crosenth@fas.harvard.edu

The workshop provides a forum for the interdisciplinary study of capitalism as a historically situated process of regulating social relations. Every two weeks during the academic year the workshop brings together graduate students, faculty, and outside scholars to study, analyze, and debate the development of modern capitalism. The workshop combines public sessions, in which visiting scholars to present works-in-progress, with closed sessions, in which graduate students debate core readings on themes such as labor, commodities, money, and the state. This combination encourages debate on the best new research on the history of capitalism while also exposing students to classic works of political economy.

Screen Cultures and the Visual Turn
Faculty Directors: Tom Conley (Visual and Environmental Studies; Romance Languages and Literatures), David Rodowick (Visual and Environmental Studies)
Graduate Student Coordinators: Stephanie Lam, stephanielam@fas.harvard.edu; Lindsey Lodhie, lodhie@fas.harvard.edu

This workshop explores new interdisciplinary analyses and theorizations of the moving image in an expanded field. Screen cultures encompass a range of contexts in which the moving image is framed, distributed, received, and interpreted. These range from the traditionally conceived sites of cinema, video, and television to increasingly dispersed new media platforms. Our focus will be on cross-disciplinary methodologies for understanding the cultural, theoretical, and historical implications of emergent moving image practices.

Workshop on History, Culture, and Society
Faculty Directors: Orlando Patterson (Sociology), John Stauffer (History of American Civilization; English)
Graduate Student Coordinator: Chris Muller, mullerchristoph@gmail.com

As a forum for the exploration of new developments in historical social science, this workshop explores interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of history, sociology, political science, psychology, and economics. The workshop’s primary methodological goal is to initiate a discussion on what constitutes acceptable historical evidence in each of the social sciences; its main substantive goal is to explore how the past influences the present. Workshop participants will explore issues such as the extent to which current levels of development in the nations of Sub-Saharan Africa can be predicted by their historical involvement in the slave trades, homicide rates in Western and developing nations over time, and the historical sources of institutions accounting for economic development.