Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 363.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:59:24 +0000
From: "R.G. Siemens" <RaySiemens@home.com>
Subject: Workshop Announcement: INSTITUTIONAL READINGS
[please excuse x-posting; please redistribute]
INSTITUTIONAL READINGS:
EARLY MODERN EUROPE AND THE MODERN UNIVERSITY
Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies
University of British Columbia
March 9-11, 2000
http://www.InstitutionalReadings.org
Should the university target an elite student population? Should the
Humanities curriculum, especially at the undergraduate level, attempt to
foster knowledge of what has been called the Western Tradition, or should
it introduce students to a wide range of cultural traditions -- even if it
means slighting canonical Western figures? How might we begin to reconcile
opposing arguments of those who advocate interdisciplinarity in graduate
teaching and scholarship with those who view such work as partly or
altogether "undisciplined"? How should scholars share the credit for
collaborative work? To what degree might graduate research assistants be
entitled to a share of the credit for projects with which they have been
involved? Should we integrate or endeavor to keep apart the traditional
activities of the school and the operations of the commercial sphere?
Institutional Readings is a workshop, to be held at the Peter Wall
Institute for Advanced Studies (9-11 March 2000), where ideas will be
exchanged about how knowledge of the past could contribute fruitfully to
present debates within the university and about how awareness of the
institutional conditions of scholarship could help to improve scholarly
practices. The meeting will bring a group of Renaissance scholars together
with a number of experts on the modern university in order to study the
interrelationship between early modem European culture and the
institutional culture of the modem academy.
The goal of Institutional Readings is threefold:
- to consider how the environment of the university has influenced
scholarly accounts of Renaissance literature, history, and society;
- to investigate the origins of academic culture, with special emphasis on
Renaissance innovations such as the expansion of market relations, the rise
of vernacular literatures, the tendency toward disciplinary specialization,
the formation of the modem idea of authorship, and the literature of
proto-feminism;
- and to discuss how we might develop a more complete long historical view
of the university, one that would no doubt involve study of other
historical periods and other academic areas such as Science, Medicine, and
Education. We will ask all participants to consider how the knowledge of
the past could help us make the future university a better place for
teaching, learning, and doing scholarship.
Since one of the purposes of the workshop is to outline a cultural history
of the academy with a special focus on the Renaissance, our focus will not
be the history of the university per se. Rather than seeking to compare
sixteenth-century Cambridge University with its present-day counterpart or
with the American university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we are inviting
participants to elaborate a broader account of the relationship between
some element of early modern culture in toto and the institution of the
modern university.
For further information, please explore the workshop's website, at
http://www.InstitutionalReadings.org
or contact the organizers, Paul Yachnin and Nancy Frelick, at the addresses
below.
Paul Yachnin
Department of English
397 - 1873 East Mall
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC. V6T 1Z1
Ph: (604) 822-4226
Fax: (604) 822-6909
yachnin@interchange.ubc.ca
Nancy Frelick
Department of French, Italian, and Hispanic Studies / Comparative Literature
797 - 1873 East Mall
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC. V6T 1Z1
Ph: (604) 822-2365
Fax: (604) 822-6675
frelick@interchange.ubc.ca
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