WHO: Ugo Mondini (University of Oxford), Michael Lysander Angerer (University of Cambridge), Wiebke Denecke (MIT)
WHAT: The Challenge
The Atlas of Human Literatures aims to build an interactive, open-source map of global literatures; a digital atlas visualizing the dynamics (changes, movements, intersections, and transformations) of literatures across time and space, along with their languages, forms, local contexts, and connections. The Atlas is inspired by a geological metaphor. It is devised to stratigraphically visualize and investigate how literary forms emerge locally, migrate across regions, hybridize, and fade. It tracks and interprets what kind of traces such processes leave on the literary landscape; how literary cultures and traditions that now seem distant were once connected or are comparable in their content and role; how intricate strata of interaction surface in specific regions; and how literatures, with their rules, modes, and aesthetics, have migrated across the globe, often invisibly. The Atlas challenges conventional literary history by uncovering hidden or neglected connections or faults, showing how literature preserves the deep traces of cultural encounters and exchange. Each stratum functions like a layer of cultural geology, capturing local phenomena and the long-distance movements that have shaped human storytelling, visualizing what is known by scholars in different fields and also bringing to light connections that modern literary histories may have overlooked or obscured. The Atlas seeks to map the entire world in high detail, enabling investigations that range from micro to macro scale, tracing phenomena from the local to the global, synchronically and diachronically.
The Atlas explores the flows of genres and forms as they travel or remain local, the shifting intersections between oral and written traditions where elements are preserved, lost, or unexpectedly resurface, and the complex tensions between élite and sub-élite cultures and their cross-regional connections that reveal how political and cultural agendas have shaped literary memory. In doing so, it offers a multi-layered, geographically sensitive view of literary history: a living stratigraphic map of songs, stories, movements, and encounters that charts a way toward a smart model of historiography for global literatures.
WHY: Motivations & Intentions
The Atlas of Human Literatures is much more than an open‑source digital map. Most literary historiography today is still compartmentalized by nation or language, often misunderstanding and obscuring historical truths manifest in intricate webs of interactions across cultures. Although these challenges are understood in theory, ensuring that conceptual and methodological tools of literary studies are truly accessible and critically debated on a shared ground across diverse contexts worldwide remains one of the most urgent tasks for fostering new visions of literature. Structural obstacles also exacerbate the situation. Academic departments are often under‑resourced, with sometimes only a single scholar dedicated to a historically “major” field and little capacity for engaging with so‑called “minor” literatures. On a difficult job market with a contracting number of humanities positions, mentors typically refrain from encouraging their students to acquire a solid familiarity with other languages and literatures and an awareness of the scholarship beyond one’s own field. Nonetheless, more scholars than ever are now working to envision a more genuinely global understanding of human literatures. This project will help connect hitherto disconnected scholarly communities and their highly atomized work, encouraging each other, collectively, to move beyond scholarship warped by national or linguistic boundaries.
By tracing human literatures in their movements and transformations, the Atlas brings into dialogue all those willing to engage in this shared exploration. The chorality of this collaborative endeavor and of its polyphonic approach is essential to capturing the complex phenomenon of literature in society and across the world and to charting its stratigraphy and connectivity. In a time when global connections have been redefined, the Atlas creates an open space for dialogue so that different perspectives, starting points, values and beliefs can be heard, understood, integrated, and used by scholars, students and educators across the world.
HOW: The project advances on two parallel tracks. Using digital humanities and conceptual modelling, the project will develop an open-source high‑resolution digital map, the actual Atlas, that visualizes how literary forms and genres emerge, travel, transform, and leave traces across time and geography. A core team will lead the platform’s development. The second track consists of a series of online and in‑person events to discuss the impact, goals, and potentialof The Atlas of Human Literatures, as well as to reflect critically on how human literatures have been conceived and narrated by literary histories across time and space. Bringing together academics, educators, practitioners, and students worldwide, these events will also keep informing the theoretical foundations on which the Atlas as a digital resource will be built. During the first two years (2025–2027), we focus on the conception of the website and the digital map, defining its offerings and the most effective ways to visualize data, and on the creation of a working prototype. The project will begin with the formation of an Editorial Board. Between Fall 2025 and Summer 2026, we will engage with Digital Humanists and future users of the Atlas to gather ideas and discuss dream goals and limitations. By Fall 2026, the team will compile lemmata and map priorities, identifying key literary phenomena, determining which connections and regions to visualize first, and establishing the initial backbone of the Atlas. In 2027, the project will implement and launch two to three experimental prototypes, each focused on a literary tradition, author, or work, to test visualization methods and user interaction. By Fall 2027, feedback from scholars and the Editorial Board will guide the refinement and integration of these prototypes, shaping the first building blocks of the Atlas and preparing it for full‑scale development.
HOW CAN I JOIN?
FIRST PHASE: Events 2025–2027
2025 – Laying the Foundations
- Project Coordinators Brainstorming Session – An intensive kickoff session to envision the Atlas, define its scope, and spark creative synergies.
- 4th Annual Conference of the MIT Global Humanities Initiative, Seoul, November 20-21, 2025 – First public presentation of the project’s vision, connecting with international scholars and potential collaborators. (online participation possible)
- First Meeting of Coordinators & Editorial Board
2026 – Expanding the Conversation
- Atlas Project Feast (Spring 2026) – A lively digital humanities gathering, inviting leading scholars in Digital Humanities and Literary Studies to showcase comparable atlas projects and share relevant insights.
- Participation in the MIT and LMU Munich-sponsored 5th Annual Conference of the MIT Global Humanities Initiative Philology 2.0 for Human Flourishing (October 2026)
- Imagining an Atlas of Human Literature – Multiple events with teachers, cultural professionals, practitioners, and potential users to understand their expectations for the Atlas.
2027 – Prototyping the Atlas Prototype Workshop (Spring 2027) – Launch of experimental prototypes and creation of master strategy for growing the Atlas
For further details, contact the project leaders.