Curated Research

When creating the website for the “Legacies of the Enlightenment” project, we were faced with a challenge: how do we divide our materials and resources in a way that is legible to visitors and would allow us to address such a vast topic, without recreating some of the most pernicious taxonomic practices of the Enlightenment? After an initial team meeting, we decided to create five groups that would serve as entry points into the materials. The groupings are meant as guides, not rules, as many of the materials do not fit easily into one single group. In order to avoid rigid taxonomies, we have adopted another common practice of enlightenment thinkers – one used handily by the editors of Diderot and D’Alembert’s famous Encyclopedia – cross-listing, known in the digital age as “tagging.”

Each entry has been tagged with a number of words or phrases relevant to the material. These may be people, places, time periods, or general fields of interest. Our list of tags was crafted relying on the expertise of each member of our team and is constantly evolving. You may use these tags to search the curated research or the teaching materials by typing commonly used words or phrases into the search bar at the top of this page. We have also compiled a list of commonly used tags below for your convenience.

Curated Research by Category

Climate

The concept of climate has origins that date back to Greek and Roman philosophical and medical texts from Hippocrates to Epicurus. Throughout the early modern period, climate remained a decisive factor in understanding natural philosophy, as well as the evolution of knowledge. During this time period, climate usually referred to the air, waters, and land, and included discussions of how these elements influence the natural world and human society. With the emergence of modernity, the concept of climate came to incorporate phenomena including carbon-fueled industrialization, urbanization, and transnational corporations. This group investigates the implications of such phenomena for our understandings of gender and sexuality, colonial projects and expeditions, racialization and ethnic differences, class, and the longevity of the biosphere. It also considers the ways in which climates inform how we think in the first place. This category constructs a bridge between Enlightenment-era concepts, theories of climate, and contemporary debates regarding climate change and the Anthropocene.

The people who headed this group in 2017 are Sara Grossman, Matthew Handelman, Kyle Powys White, Nathaniel Wolloch, and Sam White.

Disciplines

Enlightenment thinkers sought to extend the boundaries of science to encompass all of humanity and the natural world, with disciplines for the study of art, beauty, experience, society, politics, and physics. In so doing, they proposed new bases for scientific, natural, technological, political, and cultural authority, which destabilized existing institutions and structures of authority while establishing new bases for such power. This category takes as its starting principle the study of these disciplines with a view to their structures, the influence of their contexts, and their achievements and consequences.

Our research group is studying questions such as these: what are the consequences of the idea that all of nature is a machine? What metaphysical assumptions were required for the development of the psychology of attention, and what needed to change to construct the new psychology? How does scientific authority get established? How did medical science, publishing and debating its subjects in the public realm, construct both a specialized scientific community and the public authority of scientists? How do institutions shape what counts as a body of culture? What decides what it is about the arts that we study (e.g. plot, character, tone, morality), how do artworks get integrated into a single artistic discipline, and what subverts the establishment of such disciplines? What is aesthetic perception? Is enjoyment dignified or base, free or mechanical, and what is the nature of human experience that makes this so? How has the concept of a mature citizen or human being shored up class privilege or provided grounds for critiques of culture and society?

The people who headed this group in 2017 are Mark Sentesy,  Meghan Roberts,  John Grey,  Daniel Smith,  and David McCarthy.

Materialism

Over the past twenty years, there has been a noticeable shift in “the changing materialist content of materialism,” as Raymond Williams once described it. Across the disciplines, scholars are asking how Marx’s notion of materiality—the economic infrastructures that determine our lives—overtook all of the other senses in which we speak about the material world. A renewed interest in matter as a process, negotiated on the smallest and largest of scales, from the microbiological to the cosmic, has prompted a return to the archive for alternative philosophies of materiality. This includes Jane Bennett’s vital materialism which is interested in the political relations between objects, object-oriented ontology (OOO) which insists on the non-human dimensions of objects, object-oriented feminism’s critique of OOO, queer theories of animacy, as well as Elizabeth Grosz’s new work on “speculative idealism.” This thread explores definitions of materials, materiality, and matter along the lines of thingliness, perception, and ontology. Here we take “materials” and “materiality” to exist on a continuum of scale – from the microscopic to macroscopic. We are interested in the legacies of materialism—historical, dialectical, scientific, vitalist—as well as its most recent forms: object oriented feminism, vital materialism, speculative realism. Keywords include: bodies, nature, cultural production, non-human, archival matters, cultural practices, ontology, the materiality of nature, and matter itself.

The people who headed this group in 2017 are Christian Haines,  David McCarthy,  Ellen McCallum,  Grant Wythoff,  John Grey,  Mary McAlpin,  Mathew Handelman,  Natania Meeker,  and Mark Sentesy.

The In-Betweeen

One of the most enduring legacies of the Enlightenment is a desire to divide all knowledge into groups and categories. These categories, meant to simplify knowledge and learning, have the disastrous side-effect of disenfranchising those people, places, and things that fall through the cracks. On the other hand, the “in-between,” as assessed by Jacques Rancière, can be a place in which the multiplicity of subjectivities inherent in individuals overlap and become enmeshed with one another, exposing both the ambiguity and the possibility of identity. Thus the in-between allows us to engage in reflection upon relations between self and other, consider moral and ethical questions, and contemplate sexuality as a mode of human relationality. This thread examines about how relations are formed, shaped, reflected upon, and it also deliberates on the nature of connections and how they are sustained. It is necessarily interdisciplinary, spanning such fields as cultural history, musicology, literary studies, indigenous studies, political philosophy, and queer studies, among others.

 The In-Between focuses on the ways in which the Enlightenment has shaped our understanding of intersectionalities, hybridities, and relations between the human and animal or the human and non-human world. We also explore the evolution of social relations, legacies of political formations, utopian or dystopian enterprises.

The people who headed this group in 2017 are Jorge Felipe,  Tracy Rutler,  David McCarthy,  Elena Ruiz,  and Natania Meeker.

Upheavals

Upheavals and catastrophes illuminate natural or man-made events of extraordinary magnitude, which can be destructive as well as transformative. Specific examples of catastrophe include earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, droughts, fire; they also include destruction caused by nuclear or chemical weaponry, scientific and technological disasters, and political, social, cultural revolutions. The effects of catastrophes are drastic and far-reaching. Mass migration, diaspora, and destruction of infrastructure, landscape, or states can trigger enduring, irreversible changes.

Deeply disruptive as they may be, catastrophes can also evoke unexpected, creative transformations. In fact, the history from the Enlightenment to the present leaves no question that catastrophic events are capable of generating innovative texts, images, discourses, narratives, and social movements. These artifacts of catastrophe, in turn, reshape individual or collective experiences, memories, and identities. New worldviews arise in the midst of political upheavals, challenging accepted distinctions such as human vs. nature, victors vs. victims, and virtue vs. crime, in both the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds. There are countless examples of people who, after surviving catastrophes, have offered invaluable lessons about how humans and societies might respond to future disasters.

The experiences of survivors of catastrophic events have also helped create unprecedented, even transgressive forms of art, literature, music, philosophy, and science. In a larger sense, then, catastrophes and upheavals lead us to question accepted notions of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and citizenship, as well as to reconsider seemingly universal understandings of human rights, decency, and morality.

The people who headed this group in 2017 are Naoko Wake, Sara Wellman, Elena Ruiz, Cindy Ermus, Ronen Steinberg, Matt Worley, Valentina Denzel, and Sharonah Fredrick.