Premodern Studies currently exists as a subfield of almost every discipline within the humanities but rarely as a critical conceptual program. The Center for Premodern Studies at the University of Minnesota is proud to be a space of collective vision, scholarship, and academic training for faculty, students, and community members interested in innovation in the historical humanities and social sciences.

The Center for Premodern Studies, hosts interdisciplinary minors in Medieval and Early Modern Studies because the premodern world was predisciplinary. To study the past means to study a non-modern world, a world with different structures of knowing that were not divided into contemporary disciplines. To really understand historical worlds, we need to bring our pluralities of methods and the different questions they can support into dialogue.

We support an undergraduate minor in Medieval Studies and graduate minors in Early Modern Studies and Medieval Studies. These flexible interdisciplinary minors allow students to supplement their major field program with coursework in different departments and centers. Upon graduation, students receive formal certification of their cross-disciplinary training as part of a recognized university minor.