HS16: Early Modern Connected Histories

Collaborative Goals

The Early Modern Connected Histories Workshop brings together faculty, graduate students, and cultural institutions across the CNY region to explore global connections in the early modern world (c.1400–1800). Our collaborative work spans multiple regions—Mediterranean, Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and the Americas—and is grounded in a commitment to interdisciplinary, multilingual, and methodologically diverse research.

Our collaborative goals center on sustaining a vibrant intellectual network that bridges isolated scholars and fosters shared inquiry. We provide structured yet open-ended opportunities for participants to present new work, receive feedback, and build partnerships across institutions and disciplines. We are especially attentive to the needs of graduate students and early-career scholars, who benefit from exposure to a range of methods and approaches at all stages of research.

We support this mission through programming that is both thematic and innovative. In the coming year, we will host two major events:

• Chef’s Sephardic Table, a talk-and-taste lecture with culinary historian Hélène Jawhara Piner, exploring foodways as a site of cultural exchange and identity formation in the early modern Mediterranean; and
• Early Modern Embodied: Biogeography for Humanists, a day-long symposium on how early modern thinkers understood the shaping of bodies by geography, food, and environment, in conversation with contemporary genetics.

Together, these events model our broader collaborative method: combining public-facing humanities with rigorous scholarly engagement, and creating space for cross-regional, cross-disciplinary exploration of early modern entanglements. After two years of workshops and talks, this year marks a turning point: we aim to consolidate the regional scholarly community we’ve cultivated through these two signature events.