(reposting from H-Japan)

Dates: June 19 – July 7, 2017
Host Institution: Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
Deadline: March 1, 2017

Call for Applications

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute

Beyond East and West: Exchanges and Interactions across the Early Modern World (1400-1800)

We invite applications for a three-week NEH Summer Institute for college and university teachers. Non-tenure-track and adjunct faculty are particularly welcome to apply.

The period between 1400-1800 has been studied, until recently, as a time when European societies expanded to the rest of the globe through conquest and commerce. Scholars have convincingly questioned this paradigm in the past decades, and established the agency of non-European societies and communities across the globe.

The Summer Institute’s aim is to revisit this seminal period through the lens of exchange, interaction, and movement. The early modern world was unified through the near-simultaneous expansion of empires across Eurasia, from England through the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent and China. Consolidated with gunpowder weapons and new administrative technologies, and motivated by inter-imperial competition, these empires connected several parts of the globe through political and commercial networks. In the process, they also laid the ground for the circulation of individuals and communities, objects, germs, and ideas, to an unprecedented extent.

The Institute will be organized along three intertwining themes, which will build upon one another: (1) Travelers—Circulating Bodies; (2) Mapping Travel, Mapping Ideas; and (3) Connected Histories—Circulating Ideas. We will not only study the exchanges that reveal differences in cultural, political, and religious ideas, but also those that highlight convergences. Sessions will be moderated by the organizers as well as our visiting scholars: Surekha Davies (Western Connecticut State University), Nabil Matar (University of Minnesota), Charles H. Parker (St. Louis University), Ulrike Strasser (UCSD), and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (UCLA).

In order to alleviate transportation costs and living expenses, participants to the Institute will receive a stipend of US$ 2,700.

For more information about the Institute, please visit: https://earlymodernexchanges.com

For information on eligibility and how to apply, please see: https://earlymodernexchanges.com/eligibility-how-to-apply/

Please direct all application inquiries to: earlymodernexchanges@gmail.com

Organizers:

Kaya Şahin (Indiana University, Bloomington)

Julia Schleck (University of Nebraska, Lincoln)