Welcome to Rethinking, Remaking!

Rethinking, Remaking is a place to engage and reflect on the cutting-edge research our team of scholars is doing to reorient the discourse on the study of the global past in modern humanities. We, at the Global Past Research Initiative (GPRI), consider this reorientation a necessary intervention in the existing discourses dealing with the global, the transcultural, world literature, and other forms of textualities. The GPRI is a call to action, inviting students and scholars of the premodern world to rethink the humanistic inquiry and to remake an understanding of the past that is equitable and meaningfully diverse.

In conversation with our dynamic team of premodernists, this monthly blog series offers a dialogue about the limits of existing frameworks for studying premodernity (read: before 1700) and the alternative possibilities we propose. We touch on issues pertaining to non-European forms of intellectual inquiry, the global South’s relationship to Euro-American theory, Indigenous forms of knowledge, dynamic methodologies in archival research, design thinking and theorization from within, and the increasingly meditative role of generative AI technologies.  

We hope to engage conversationally and push the area studies boundaries by speaking across the thresholds of intellectual disciplines and listening beyond our own research interests. At Rethinking, Remaking, art historians think with philologists, archeologists with historians, and philosophers with Indigenous Studies scholars to bridge the gap between various worlds within premodern scholarship, which remains, by and large, isolated in a disciplinary vacuum.

Ideas shape the world we inhabit. At Rethinking, Remaking, we welcome all scholarly reflection that mediates knowledge between the world of the academy and the world beyond. It is our hope that together, we will not only challenge the existing frameworks but provide alternative forms of thinking from within the premodern and Indigenous pasts of non-western societies.

Stay tuned. Next month we explore the alternative ways of thinking about “Theory” and what theorization from within can accomplish in the reorientation of the modern humanities.