Mission Statement

Co-directors, 2008-09: Clement Hawes (English), Gregg Roeber (History)

Our mission is to help Penn State fulfill the potential of interdisciplinary study in the period 1400-1800. We aim to create the conditions in which students and faculty can work in the unexplored interstices between disciplines. True interdisciplinarity—in which a scholar demonstrates genuine fluency in two disciplinary vocabularies, and grasps what is at stake in the differences between them—is a rarity. Such a fluency requires a hard-earned ability to “translate” between disciplines. The challenge is to find where (in a topical sense), and in what terms, contact and exchange can occur across departments.

Through team-taught courses and on-campus events—talks, workshops, symposia, reading groups, contests, and social gatherings—CEMS seeks to cultivate genuinely interdisciplinary work. We foster sustained conversations, especially in terms of dialogues between disciplines. We hope to make an ability to talk across departments and to write across disciplines constitutive of many new projects in the Humanities on campus. We are as focused on graduate student work as we are on work by faculty. The Early Period Reading Group is an affiliated graduate student working group. CEMS likewise intends to enhance the publishing abilities of our doctoral students, and, of course, their eventual job placements. We would like our graduate students to have the fluency described above.

We aim, above all, to involve local faculty and graduate students in events that produce or showcase interdisciplinary early modern scholarship. We have a core group of people, the CEMS Steering Committee, on whom the major responsibility for the group’s activities falls. We have a much larger cast of floating personnel, who, in an ad hoc and intermittent manner, affiliate themselves with one project or another, as their interests guide them. We welcome participation at any level of involvement.

Our geography is global. “Early Modernity” was not simply hatched in Europe and transplanted elsewhere. Our faculty have expertise that reaches all around the globe. We think in trans-national terms from the very outset, which might make it more accurate—if not entirely compatible with “Modernity” or “Premodernity”—to speak of “Early Modernities.” Because of our geographical reach, the Committee for Early Modern Studies can accommodate a variety of innovative “units of analysis” in geographical terms.

Two edited volumes have come out of our work so far—each also the result of an on-campus conference—and a third is in progress.