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To register for the course, please visit the OneStop course schedule page
It is a longstanding tradition in many disciplines -- especially in the arts, humanities, and certain social sciences -- that dissertations take a narrative form, which necessarily tracks a change or transformation. Whether the basis of this change is concrete or abstract, whether it pursues the transformation of an idea or that of a physical mutation, implicit is the claim that the dissertation studies a transformation over time. In what ways does our scholarship depend on notions of temporally conditioned change? How do we translate our understanding of change into written narratives, and what are the available paradigms to do so? In this seminar, we hope to gather dissertators working on projects that take the concept of change -- or history, narrative, transformation, evolution, progress -- and have a productive discussion about the limits and possibilities of temporal change. We will read selected theoretical discussions on these ideas (from historians of science, historiographers, literary theorists, and philosophers on such topics as positivism, causality, agency, quantification and interpretation), share our disciplinary paradigms and assumptions about the role of change over time, distribute our writing for comment and review, and discuss the writing process together. Dissertators and Ph.D. students at other stages are welcome; we will determine appropriate writing goals for everyone. While this seminar is organized by faculty from History and Literature, graduate students are welcome from any discipline whose work engages with these topics. N.B. Readings for the first class session will be distributed by email to registered students before the semester begins.
Professor Cherbuliez is in the Department of French and Italian, and Professor Shank is in the Department of History. They are also two of the co-organizers of Theorizing Early Modern Studies (TEMS) a collaborative, interdisciplinary workshop.
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