HS16: Early Modern Connected Histories

Collaborative Goals

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:

1. Eurasian Exchange and the Transformation of the Medieval World: We will be hosting Nicola di Cosmo (Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University) with a lecture plus classroom talk/visit. This event develops out of his recent book on Venice and the Mongols, and the unprecedented contacts fostered through this exchange.
2. Losing Early Modernity: Nature, Biogeography, and Disappearance, a day-long symposium. This symposium reframes early modern biogeography not as a story of expansion and circulation (the focus of our first event), but one of loss. While historians have emphasized mobility—of peoples, plants, animals, and commodities across newly connected worlds—this event asks what disappeared in the process, and how those disappearances were apprehended, managed, or ignored.

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.