Inaugural Conference 2021: Worlds Enough and Time: Towards a Comparative Humanities

Friday, November 12, 2021

Section 1: Humanities Concepts and Disciplines      

8:00 – 8:15 am (EST)  Welcoming Remarks from Wiebke Denecke, Alexander Forte, and Tristan Brown (MIT)

8:15 – 9:15 am  (EST) Panel 1
Moderator: Tristan Brown (MIT)

1A: The Story of Us: A Cultural History of Humans – Martin Puchner

1B: Why Philosophy Can’t Globalize?! The Promise of Metaphilosophy and the New Comparative Global Humanities – Wiebke Denecke

1C: Three Challenges for Comparative Global Humanities – Rens Bod

1D: ‘Studia Humanitatis’ and ‘Renwen’: Teaching the Classics in Contemporary China – Xinyao Xiao

Panel Discussion

9:15 – 9:30 am (EST)  Break  

9:30 – 10:30 am (EST) Panel 2
Moderator: Rens Bod          

2A: The Study of Elsewhere, “Elsewhere Studies,” and the Global Humanities – Jeffrey Niedermaier

2B: Thinking With and From Archipelagos in Global Humanistic Studies – Olga Blomgren

2C: The Gift of Companionship: Homo Amicus and the Work of Persian Texts – Mana Kia

2D: Latinity as Transnational Language, Latinity as Symptomatic of the Modern Discussion of Intercultural Humanities – Gareth Williams

Panel Discussion

10:30 – 10:45 am (EST)  Break  

Section 2: Regions & Functions of Texts                  

10:45 – 11:45 am (EST) Panel 3
Moderator: Alexander Forte

3A: Sprouts of Fortune: The Powers of Ancient Trees in Late Imperial China – Tristan Brown

3B: Mountains, Meaning, Mediation: Petrarch’s “Ascent to Mont Ventoux” and the Chinese shanshui 山水 Tradition – Beth Harper

3C: Transwar Japanese Reading of Sima Qian’s Record of the Grand Historian: Reconsidering the Verum/Factum Principle – Satoru Hashimoto

Panel Discussion


Saturday, November 13, 2021

Section 2: Regions & Functions of Texts Continued             

8:00 – 9:00 am (EST)  Panel 4
Moderator: Mana Kia

4A: Ajami Literacies in West Africa: Decolonializing Knowledge Production and Humanistic Inquiry – Daivi Rodima-Taylor

4B: Hybrid Humanities: A Mexican Map – David Carrasco

4C: Retelling Stories: Translation and Imitation Across Literary Cultures – Sunil Sharma

4D: Allusion and Translation: Indian texts, Indian theories, and the Prospects of a Global Humanities – Whitney Cox

Panel Discussion

9:00 – 9:15 am (EST)  Break  

Section 3: Hermeneutics and Tools              

9:15 – 10:15 am (EST) Panel 5
Moderator: Sunil Sharma

5A: Ancient Voices and Cultural (Meta-)Theory – Alexander Forte

5B: Textual Mobility and the Global Humanities – Stephanie Ann Frampton

5C: The Art of Interpretation: Reading, Hermeneutics, and Analysis from a Global Perspective – Michael Puett

5D: Deep Learning: On Copying, Continuity, and Efforts to Transcribe the Holdings of the National Library of [South] Korea – Wayne de Fremery

Panel Discussion  

10:15 – 11:00 am (EST) Keynote Commentator – Jürgen Osterhammel

After 11:00am (EST) Open Drinks