The World History Center is pleased to support five working groups during the 2023-2024 academic year, including four new working groups!
The Transforming Systemic Racism: Historical Truth Telling and Reparations Working Group will continue its activities from last year. The working group looks to promote a more globalized understanding of the institution of slavery and its impacts as well as recent global efforts to advance reparations and transform systemic racism. The group will engage in historical research to develop and advance concrete proposals for reparations, organize campus and public programming and working group activities to advance collaboration and learning on these themes, and explore ideas for furthering cross-university collaboration to promote historical truth telling and learning that can further racial justice.
The Center is also pleased to welcome four new working groups this year. Amazonian Planetarities is an interdisciplinary exploration that aims to bring together scholars at different levels and from various disciplines, such as anthropology, history, environmental humanities, life sciences, and others. By considering the planet as a critical image of our shared globalized world, the workshop seeks to unveil the social-ecological global complex that both originates from and influences Amazonian polities.
The Islamicate Working Group brings together scholars whose work relates to the study of Islam and/or Muslims. The term “Islamicate” was coined by historian Marshall Hodgson to describe the study of anything related to Islam and Muslims, which can include cultural complexes loosely associated with or influenced by Islam, and non-Muslim minorities living in Muslim majority areas. The term Islamicate captures a multifaceted approach to Islamic Studies, which this group seeks to embody by bringing together a variety of methodologies including ethnographic, historical, and material studies-based approaches. The group will meet several times a semester and workshop works-in-progress, providing one another feedback.
New Theoretical Directions in Mediterranean Archaeology is a series of workshops that explore the role of archaeological theory in our understanding of the global past. Theory provides common ground for archaeologists working around the world and across academic departments because archaeological method is inherently interdisciplinary. Over the course of the 2023-24 academic year, the working group will host four scholars conducting fieldwork across the Mediterranean basin, a diverse region linking Europe, Africa, and Asia, to discuss how theory informs their work.
Appalachia has a rich and complex environmental, social, and political history which impacts its present and will shape the future of the region. The Global Appalachia Working Group will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars whose work evaluates these pasts, presents, and futures of the region using a global and world-historical framework. In the spring of 2024, the working group and the Global Studies Center will host a series of book discussions focusing on the region of Appalachia from a global perspective. The series theme of the series is "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Region in Motion." Sign up here!