Working Groups, 2022–2023

This workshop has existed at Yale since the late 1980s and concentrates on discussions of religion’s role in American history and culture from the colonial period to the present. Graduate students give most presentations, but sometimes a professor describes a current project or the group discusses an important new article or book. The workshop is open to anyone in the Yale community who wishes to attend—faculty and students alike—and meets once a month during term.

Our website: http://history.yale.edu/academics/working-groups/american-religious-history-workshop

The Approaches to Recent and Contemporary History (ARCH) working group is for graduate students across disciplines to explore and evaluate methods and theories pertaining to the study of the recent past. Founded by historians in diverse regional subfields who study a wide variety of themes and topics from the 1960s through the present, this group is an intellectual community for scholars confronting the challenges related to researching the contemporary moment from the historical perspective. The group is guided by the following questions: How do you periodize the recent past? How do you write a history of the present and the recent past? What unique opportunities and obstacles are posed by studying the recent past? What strategies from other disciplines and what sources can historians of the contemporary moment integrate into their research methods? What, in turn, do historians have to contribute conceptually and methodologically to other, more present-oriented disciplines in the humanities and social sciences? What responsibility do historians have to the living subjects of the histories they write? How can and should historians position themselves to be engaged in current political debates? What does “presentism” mean for a historian working on the recent past?

The Dante Working Group is a student-led association centered around the study and the promotion of the work of Dante Alighieri among other graduate students and the Yale community in general. The activities of the DWG in the past years have varied from a series of conferences with Dante Studies scholars from inside and outside Yale to a weekly reading group of the Comedy in the original Italian with the help of an English translation. Our aim is to use our resources to provide graduate students in the Humanities and beyond with a space other than the classroom in which to begin or deepen understanding of Dante and his works.

Yale’s Global Philosophy Reading Group invites you to join for its inaugural year! We plan to meet from 1:00-2:30 PM in HQ (precise room TBD) about six Fridays per term, with light refreshments provided. Together, we will discuss primary sources in translation and analyze English-language scholarship on global philosophical traditions, for about 20-40 pages per session. Hopefully, these discussions will allow us to add detail to our mental maps of philosophy and reflect on our own hermeneutic decisions. Occasionally, we will also invite scholars of global philosophical traditions to Yale for guest lectures.

The Fall 2022 theme is weakness of will: the phenomenon when someone intentionally acts against their better judgment. We will organize the Spring theme near the end of Fall term. If you are interested, please write to james.brown-kinsella@yale.edu to join our mailing list.

The Iranology Working Group aims to be a space in which to study the languages and literatures surviving from the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language tree, such as Persian (Old, Middle, New), Avestan, Parthian, Sogdian, Bactrian, among others, intending as well to build connections to adjacent disciplines such as Achaemenid, Sasanian, or Zoroastrian Studies, Iranian and Central Asia Studies, and others.

We intend to be a reading and research group focused on the contemporary critical and philological scholarship around these languages, particularly but not limited to sociolinguistics, historical morphology, and to the specific issues of transmission that pertain to small corpus languages. We aim also to provide a context for groups aiming to study and to read them at an informal level.

Meetings are open to students, faculty, and staff alike, they are held monthly and may take various forms, but for 2022–23 we expect them to take the shape of pre-circulated secondary literature readings presented either by a member of the group or by an invited speaker.

This working group provides a biweekly space for the discussion of recent as well as classic scholarship by humanists pertaining to all areas of the law, its histories, and problems of jurisprudence and legal interpretation, as they intersect with cultural texts, practices, and representations. Because we range across time periods and our interests traverse traditional disciplinary boundaries, we welcome literary critics, historians, political theorists, academic lawyers, and more. In 2022–23, we plan to pursue two broad strands of inquiry: 1) genealogies of legal personhood, the investigation of which includes (but will not be limited to) some of the ways definitions of legal personhood have overlapped with various property regimes; 2) rights discourses, particularly insofar as they bear upon legal entities denied—or only partially granted—the status of personhood (e.g., slaves, non-human animals, artificial intelligence). Some attention might be given as well to law-and-performance and the place of Roman law in recent political philosophy. Discussions will also address the challenges and methodological difficulties facing humanists engaged with the scholarly study of law.

Medieval Britain was a site of encounter between languages and peoples for nearly a thousand years, and the scholarship that seeks to understand it mirrors this diversity in its subjects and approaches. This interdisciplinary working group provides a regular venue for graduate students working on the textual cultures of Medieval Britain, focusing in particular on English literary texts, to share work in progress with an audience of their peers and select faculty visitors. Presenters receive rigorous feedback through a formal response and open discussion.

The Medieval Song Lab brings together scholars in Connecticut and nearby interested medieval song. Both “Medieval” and “Song” are taken in their broadest reasonable sense, to include sacred and secular music from before c. 1400. The lab hosts at least three events per semester that focus around the discussion of pre-circulated papers. We also organize weekly informal singing from medieval notation. Flexibility of format and focus as well as interdisciplinary membership—the MSL draws faculty and students from music, French, English, Italian, and Comparative Literature departments as well as performers—help make the Lab a fun and productive environment in which members can share their work, develop new research ideas, and foster a sense of community. For more information and event listings, see https://songlab.yale.edu/.

This group provides a forum for presenting and discussing graduate student and faculty work in all areas of moral philosophy, from metaethics to applied ethics, and in the surrounding areas such as political philosophy, moral psychology, and philosophy of law. A hallmark of the working group is our commitment to bringing together people who approach moral philosophy from different disciplinary perspectives and might not otherwise come into contact with each other’s work. All meetings discuss pre-circulated papers, which will be made available for participants roughly a week beforehand. Our meetings are two hours long and consist of a short (10–15 min) presentation followed by discussion. Please feel free to contact the co-organizers if you’d like to present your work or if you’d like to be added to our mailing list.

Ever since its earliest known writings, philosophy, in the course of its own pursuits, has engaged with the built environment, addressing it as a backdrop for an argument, a metaphor for an idea, a source of information, a trigger for reflection, and increasingly as a subject in itself. The heyday of these ventures occurred during a highly prolific, diverse, intense, and consequential interdisciplinary exchange with avidly curious architects and urbanists in the late 20^th century, with effects that continue to reverberate in the way these disciplines work today. But architects are not always the authors of built works, and even when they are they remain but one element, albeit an important one, of the systems that shape the massively impacting ever-present setting of our everyday lives that is the built environment. Now canonical authors in architectural theory like Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and many others spoke of modern designs as well as traditional homes constructed by their owners or local guilds, and of rooms, roads, railways, bridges, streets, gardens, temples, museums, prisons, towers, monuments, cemeteries, shopping arcades, urban fabrics, and even ruins, reading them with a variety of idiosyncratic outlooks that brought forth all kinds of illuminating and influential insights.

What should we talk about today? How does philosophy contribute to an understanding of the built environment? And how does the built environment as a topic inform contemporary thinking? What is there to be said and gained from these discussions by those who shape the built environment, not just architects, planners, and landscape designers, but others too, like engineers, scientists, lawmakers, speculators, activists, artists, and all of us users of these spaces? As these domains change along with the word within and upon which they operate, so do the potentials for their interactions. What are, or ought to be, the important debates concerning the built environment in the present and immediate future, and what role does philosophy play in them? What new ideas, approaches, authors, and works might illuminate them?

The Philosophy and the Built Environment Working Group tackles these questions on a monthly basis. Each session dives into a particular topic drawn from discussions on what these should be, why, and how to pursue them. Participants are invited to focus on material they themselves proposed in advance, ranging from reading to projects, with the support of special guests knowledgeable on the issue. All those interested in taking part, regularly or dropping by for specific sessions, are encouraged explore tentative new ideas in an informal, intellectually stimulating and disciplinarily diverse setting.

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The Pre-Modern Environmental Humanities Working Group (PMEH) is dedicated to exploring the ways the environmental humanities can be used to understand pre-modern societies and cultures (pre-1750 CE). We want to have a place where we can think about methods for understanding past environments, the relationship between pre-modern studies and environmental humanities, and the role of pre-modern studies in conceptualizing the current climate catastrophe. Once a month, participants will meet to discuss previously circulated readings related to scholarship on pre-modern environments and cultures. The group is open to anyone interested in the pre-modern world and the environment, including those from Anthropology, Classics, Forestry and Environmental Studies, History, Medieval Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and Renaissance Studies.

While the hegemonic narrative of secularization has long been contested across disciplines for more than one generation, the field of literary studies seems reluctant to launch critical response. This working group seeks to problematize the deep-seated secularist presumptions, both theoretical and methodological, in the study of East Asian Literatures. On the one hand, it (re)visits the questions of the field broadly defined as “Religion and Literature,” in both modern and pre-modern contexts. On the other, it explores the interpretive and methodological possibilities that East Asian literatures might bring to the contemporary discussions of secular modernity and the post-secular. How do “religious” texts complicate our understanding of literature, in terms of genre, narration, hermeneutics, etc.? How do literary texts (re-)define what religion could possibly be? What is the relationship between the texts traditionally labeled as “religious” and those categorized as “secular”? What does it mean to challenge ideological secularism in a non-European context? 

Our working group meets regularly throughout the year. Each meeting starts with a brief presentation (10-15 minutes) followed by discussion. In the attempt to probe the interstices between literary and religious studies, we welcome participants from all Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines.

2022-23 Topic: Between the Humanities and Social Sciences: German Theory in the 1960s

The various larger and smaller debates of the pivotal moment of 1960s West Germany remain highly relevant to our own time, offering themselves to archeological rediscovery and reconsideration of intellectual strengths and shortcomings, lost threads and upshots. The German 1960s demands to be reread, for example, in connection to recent discussions in, for example: the history of science; “postcritique”; the digital humanities and computational literary scholarship; the attendant renewed interest in methodological questions, including, from the side of the humanities, the history and future of textual study; the divide between “continental” and “analytical” philosophy; the current global political situation (which again puts extreme pressure on the humanities and social sciences to define their specific contributions, their implicit and explicit political stances, the equitability and accessibility of their institutions); the desire (certainly not universal) to reverse the methodological hardening of the fronts between the philosophical, philological and hermeneutic humanities vs. the data-driven social sciences.

The primary and secondary readings will be decided collectively by the group. However, possible authors and topics might include: Adorno, Arendt, Blumenberg, Gadamer, Gehlen, Habermas, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Husserl, Jauss, Koselleck, Löwith, Luhmann, Szondi, Taubes, Weber; the research group Poetik und Hermeneutik, secularization, logical positivism, the “positivism dispute” (Positivismusstreit), 20th-century sociology, philology and literary criticism, philosophical anthropology, philosophical hermeneutics, phenomenology, theories of technology, polemics and controversies.