This seminar series seeks to create a community of scholars who, from their own regional and theoretical specializations, seek broad answers to local puzzles. The field of world history, now being revitalized from the bottom up, presents a concrete and disciplined, stimulating and fertile platform for rethinking social theory outside of the nation-state and the continent. A bigger geographical scale and more fluid transregional topographies hold the promise of greater explanatory power. At the same time, anthropology, cultural studies, and the new historicism in literature have surfaced from the depths of monoculturalism to rediscover pidgin islands of transcultural engagement through the half-millennium of the rise of the West. In this convergence of metropolitan and marginal perspectives, a new opportunity is emerging for developing fresh conceptual approaches to area studies, through interdisciplinary engagements informed by a shared sense of history and theory. Between Montesquieu’s sweet commerce and Hobbes’s war of all against all, both a new urgency and a new prospect exist for exploring and re-envisioning the knotty entanglements girdling the globe today. This seminar seeks to develop that opportunity over the next few years through a series of thematic conversations made possible by the newly emerging geographical and cosmopolitan sensibilities fostered by world history and transcultural studies.

Engseng Ho, Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Studies, chairs the seminar.

Contact Information

For more information, please contact Susan Farley
Telephone: 617-496-5537
E-mail: smfarley@fas.harvard.edu