« HOME

The Center

Fellowships

Workshops

Events

Digital

2008-09 Humanities Research Network Projects

Anglo-American antiquarians and early modern science

Michael Shanks, Classics
Giovanna Ceserani, Classics

This project aims to investigate the proposition that what is often called the antiquarian tradition in early modern Europe (roughly 1500-1820) was not an intellectual backwater to the mainstream development of experimental science. An international team of scholars will pursue a multidisciplinary approach to the study of early scientific practice (fieldwork, collection and sampling, documentation, and archiving), employing a web-based collaborative framework of commentary and critique connected with high-resolution digitally scanned sources. As well as this open access research resource, the project will produce a collaboratively authored book presenting the results of research into several specific questions of the relationship of the antiquarian tradition to early modern science.

Collaborators:

  • Henry Lowood, Curator, History of Science and Technology, Stanford Libraries
  • Richard Hingley, Reader, Department of Archaeology, University of Durham, UK
  • Alain Schnapp, Professor, Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, Founding Director, Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (INHA) Paris
  • Susan Alcock, Professor and Director, Joukowski Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University
  • Hariette Hemassi, University Librarian, Brown University
  • Christopher Witmore, Research Fellow, Joukowski Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University
The Assemblies of Lovers: Art, Poetry, and Religion in Persianate Islam

Shahzad Bashir, Religious Studies

This project is a comprehensive historical study of Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Gāzurgāhī's Assemblies of Lovers (Majālis al-'ushshāq), a religious/literary work in Persian that was completed in 1504 in Herat (present-day Afghanistan) and became a very popular subject for lavishly illuminated manuscripts in Iran and the Ottoman empire during the sixteenth century CE. The resulting volume will bring this work and its artistic history to the attention of people beyond a narrow group of specialists for the first time.

Collaborators:

  • Jamal Elias, Class of 1965 Term Professor, Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
  • Kishwar Rizvi, Assistant Professor, History of Art, Yale University
Interactive Digital Environmental History of California

Richard White, History

This project will focus on a new area of research, a digital history of conservation and development primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area but also over other areas of California. It will involve collaboration at a distance between scholars at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Washington. This project will result in publication of research papers in peer-reviewed journals, as well publication of dynamic web-based visualizations exploring the changing relationship between conservation and development in the post-World War II era in Silicon Valley and the wider Bay Area.

Collaborators:

  • Jon Christensen, Ph.D. Candidate, History Department, Stanford University, will be the coordinator of the project
  • Erik Steiner, Managing Director, Spatial History Project, Stanford University
  • Robert McDonald, David H. Smith Conservation Biology Fellow, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
  • Mike Reilly, Researcher, Urban Group, Stanford University
  • Karen Seto, Assistant Professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences & Center Fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies and Woods Institute for the Environment
  • Margaret O’Mara, History Department, University of Washington
  • Pat Hanrahan, Canon USA Professor in the School of Engineering, Computer Science Department, Stanford University
  • Alan MacEachren, Professor of Geography, Director, GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography, Pennyslvania State University
  • Jennifer Goldman, Associate Curator, Manuscripts and Institutional Archivist, Huntington Library
Intimate Encounters, Postcolonial Engagements: Archaeologies of Empire and Sexuality

Barbara Voss, Anthropology

The aim of this project is to generate new perspectives on the sexual politics of empire from the archaeological study of the material remains of colonization. This collaboration will bring the expertise of eminent archaeological researchers to bear on the lack of critical attention given to sexuality in archaeological research on imperialism. The final objective of this study is the publication of an edited book that would include both collaborative essays as well as individual case-studies contributed by project participants.

Collaborators:

  • Dr. El Casella, Manchester University
Knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment: Producing the Encyclopédie

Keith Baker, History
Dan Edelstein, French and Italian

This project uses data mining of digitized texts to improve our understanding of how the Encyclopédie was produced. The goal is to shed light not only on this individual work, but also on the shape and status of knowledge in the eighteenth century. Completion of the project will make available on the ARTFL site the complete lists of borrowed texts, integrating this information into the Encyclopédie database and will result in a jointly publish a detailed study of the preliminary results.

Collaborators:

  • Robert Morrissey, Director of ARTFL, University of Chicago
  • Mark Olsen, Associate Director of ARTFL
  • Glenn Roe, ARTFL staff
  • Robert Voyer, ARTFL staff
Law and Society in Egypt from Alexander to the Arab Conquest, 332 BC - 640 AD

Joe Manning, Classics

This is a book project on the documentary legal sources from Egypt from the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. Our focus is the judicial system from the viewpoint of the legal document. Not merely a collection of sources in translation, it is to be a major contribution to the study of comparative law. The documents from Egypt, covering six major legal traditions (ancient Egyptian, demotic, Coptic, Greek, Roman, and Aramaic), form the richest corpus of texts through which it is possible to discuss the interaction of different legal traditions as well as the evolution of legal institutions over the course of more than a thousand years.

Collaborators:

  • J.G. Keenan, Loyola University of Chicago
  • Uri Yiftach-Firanko, Hebrew University
Literary and Cultural History of Contemporary Europe

Amir Eshel, Comparative Literature and German Studies

This project is aimed to study the literary, cultural, and social transformation of Europe in the context of Europe's eastward expansion and recent emigration. This collaboration with researchers from Stanford, Berlin, and Jerusalem will enable us to open new exploration of Europe’s eastern community origins, and triangulate our analysis of representations of the west and modernity in Europe's dynamic communities. The group will produce an initial publication of the combined narratives from the three-part workshop on new literary and artistic culture in immigrant Europe.

Collaborators:

  • Prof. Dr. Sigrid Weigel, Director, Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin (Zentrum fur Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin)
  • Prof. Bianca Kühnel, Director, European Forum at the Hebrew University
  • Jack Cotton, Professor of Architecture and Fine Arts, Department of the History of Art, the Hebrew University
Poetries in Contact: The Encounter of Perso-Arabic and Sanskritic metrical traditions

Paul Kiparski, Linguistics

How and why are the Persian meters modified in the Urdu of Islamic poets? How do Urdu meters, in turn, get modified in the hands of Hindu poets, writing in Hindi and Marathi? How do the lexical and linguistic properties of each language factor into these poetic changes? We will gather a corpus of ghazals in four languages forming a continuous part of the chain of transmission, analyze it along the general lines of Kiparsky & Hansons "parametric" framework (Language 1996), and bring the results to bear on the questions raised above. We plan to report our initial findings in several co-authored journal articles; if all goes well, the project will continue and result in a book.

Collaborators:

  • Fatemeh Alavi, Visiting Researcher at Stanford
  • Ashwini Deo, Assistant Professor in Historical Linguistics and Sanskrit, Yale University
  • Tyler Schnoebelen, William R. and Sara Hart Kimball Fellow, Department of Linguistics, Stanford
Relative Clauses and Noun-modifying Clauses: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation

Yoshiko Matsumoto, Asian Languages

The aim of this project is to challenge and change the current state and predominant approach of research in the investigation of clausal noun-modifying constructions (NMCs) with a focus on languages in Asia. We plan to do so by investigating in depth NMCs in collaboration with linguists who are experts in the less frequently studied target languages using corpora of natural text and by collectively developing a framework for systematic cross-linguistic investigation.

Collaborators:

  • Bernard Comrie, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology/University of California, Santa Barbara

    • and
  • Kaoru Horie, University of Tohoku, Japan (Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Marathi)
  • Elena Kalinina, Moscow State University, Russia (Daghestanian languages)
  • Jaklin Kornfilt, Syracuse University (Turkish languages)
  • Shin-Sook Kim, University of Frankfurt, Germany (Korean)
  • Beth Levin, Stanford University (Italian, Lexical semantics)
  • Stephen Matthews, University of Hong Kong (Chinese/Cantonese)
  • Johanna Nichols, University of California at Berkeley (Chechen, Ingush)
  • Michael Noonan, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (Tibeto-Burman)
  • Peter Sells, The School of Oriental an African Studies, UK (Korean, Japanese)
  • Virginia Yip, University of Hong Kong (Chinese/Cantonese)
Researching the Unpublished James Joyce

Carol Shloss, English

Carol Shloss is working with a team of Joyce experts on researching unpublished material leading to a deeper understanding of Joyce's life and work.

Collaborators:

  • Robert Spoo, attorney at Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, P.C.
  • Michael Groden, English, University of Western Ontario
  • Anne Fogarty, University College Dublin
  • William Brockman, Paterno Family Librarian for Literature, Pennsylvania State University
  • Paul K. Saint-Armour, English, University of Pennsylvania
Speed limits

Jeffrey Schnapp, French and Italian

SPEED limits is concerned with themes of speed and slowness in modern culture. Though the project has an exhibition at its center, it represents a true research project whose outcome will expand the frontiers of knowledge in the humanities whether from the standpoint of the multi-author print volume that will represent the project’s most enduring legacy or from that of a mixed reality approach to cultural programming that it will inaugurate, contributing to the implementation of a revolutionary new virtual world platform.

Collaborators:

  • Maria Gough, Art History, Stanford
  • Pat Hanrahan, Computer Science, Stanford
  • Sarah Jain, Anthropology, Stanford
  • Vladlen Koltun, Computer Science, Stanford
  • Henry Lowood, Stanford University Libraries
  • Mirko Zardini, Director, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal and Professor of Architectural History, Princeton
  • Giovanna Borasi, Curator of Contemporary Architecture
  • Cathy Leff, Director, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami
  • Marianne Lamonaca Chief Curator, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami
  • Geoff Kaplan, Lecturer in graphic design, California College for the Arts
  • Sylvia Lavin Professor and chair, Architecture and Urban Planning, UCLA
  • Ken Goldberg, Director, UC Berkeley Automation Sciences Laboratory
  • Tom Levin, Professor of German Studies, Princeton