EMW News
Keep checking this page for the latest news on Early Modern Workshop.
2009 Early Modern Workshop Announcement
The sixth Early Modern Workshop will focus on the topic of “Reading across Cultures: The Jewish Book and Its Readers in the Early Modern Period.” The workshop will be held at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University from Sunday, August 23, 2009 and to Tuesday, August 25, 2009. We would like to invite qualified graduate students of the early modern period to apply to attend the workshop. Up to 5 graduate students will attend and receive a fellowship covering travel, accommodation, and (kosher) meals. Candidates should send their C.V. and a short abstract (not longer than 2 pages) of the dissertation project to Magda Teter at mteter@wesleyan.edu by May 15, 2009. The decision will be made by May 31.
This year's presenters will include Ann Blair (Harvard University), as the keynote speaker; Avri Bar-Levav (Open University), Shlomo Berger (University of Amsterdam), Miriam Bodian (University of Texas at Austin), Yaakob Dweck (Princeton), Federica Francesconi (UCLA), Boaz Hus (Ben-Gurion), Paweł Maciejko (Hebrew University), Moshe Rosman (Bar-Ilan), Adam Shear (Pittsburg), Adam Sutcliffe (King's College), Ruth von Bernuth (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Bernard Cooperman (University of Maryland). Other prominent scholars and former EMW participants will join us for the seminars and a roundtable discussion.
The workshop aims to understand more deeply the developments in reading within Jewish society, as well as the impact the Jewish book may have had on culture in early modern Europe among both Jews and Christians. Recent studies, mostly on France, England, and Italy, have focused on the people behind “the book” – not only the author, but also those involved in book production and distribution, as well as the readers. As Guiglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier have argued, the text is fixed, whereas reading is ephemeral and creative. This workshop will seek to open a discussion of the culture of reading in Jewish society, as well as of the reading of Jewish books in Christian society, during a period of rapid cultural transformation. It will bring existing scholarship on the history of reading in Christian Europe to bear on the subject of Jewish reading. For example, scholars in this realm have highlighted the importance of medieval monastic culture for the development of silent reading, which in the early modern period became normalized within a broader reading community. What were the different or parallel developments within Jewish society, with its very different institutions and conventions of learning? How did print and access to books affect readers? Did it facilitate new reading communities? Did it modify existing reading traditions? And did it affect the ways of reading? How did authorities seek to control or prevent access to new texts, and how did these measures affect readers?
This year's workshop is sponsored by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard, Columbia University's Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Wesleyan University's Jewish and Israel Studies Certificate Program, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, Yeshiva University, and University of Maryland’s Louis L. Kaplan Chair of Jewish History at the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies.