Research Workshops and Reading Groups

About our Workshops

The Center for Premodern Studies (CPS) regularly supports research workshops. These faculty- and graduate student-led initiatives involve scholars at the University of Minnesota as well as partners at local, national, and international institutions.

Research workshops address intellectual questions in global premodern studies and vary greatly in their topics of inquiry and workshop activities—ranging from small reading groups focused on a diverse global literature to workshops linked to graduate seminars, conferences, and major research initiatives. CPS research workshops model collaboration across disciplines, chronologies, and geographies. If you have an idea for a new research workshop, please email CPS Associate Director Lydia Garver at [email protected].

Current Research Workshops

Title, Leader(s)	Focus
The Archive Project Contacts: Juliette Cherbuliez and Michelle Hamilton	An archive is a site of cultural memory. It is defined by both what its contains and what it leaves out, whether intentionally or unintentionally. As Ann Stoler has explored, an archive is an epistemic space that, while promising proof texts and “truths” of the past, sometimes only offers vestiges of the violence that left the record to the victors, while the trace of the vanquished is lost. How do we restore the traces of the vanquished, instrumentalised, and unheard? We aim to explore questions about what an archive is, what it has been and what it can be, as well as how has it been constructed and how we might prefer it be deconstructed or re-constructed. Guiding questions include: What kinds of knowledge have traditionally been included in premodern archives and how were and are such archives constructed, and, importantly for us as scholars today, who constructed and continues to construct as well as who worked with and in, and continues to work with and in such archives? What was not included or what has gone missing from such archives? How might we approach archives in novel ways to allow otherwise unheard voices to be located and considered? Goals Restore the epistemological complexity of the premodern world to our research habits by combining our modern disciplinary knowledge as we examine our objects of study; Create productive dialogue and exchange information about archival study across a range of practices, by bringing together librarians, curators, archivists, scholars, and the curious public Develop a set of best practices in new, predisciplinary approaches to the lost voices of the archive. IAS Collaborative January 2024 - December 2025 DAAD Grant February 2026 - December 2027
Exploring Assumptions Contact: Noah Segal	The lenses of Western modernity surreptitiously cause us to study non-modern cultures in ways that disregard their own claims about their world in favor of our own. The product of this problem is a colonialist narrative that presents premodern cultures as flawed or inconsistent (because they fail to meet modern criteria) and modern (usually Western) cultures as the resolution of these inconsistencies. Exploring the Assumptions of Cultural History is a three-year series (beginning in the 24-25 academic year) of visiting fellowships sponsored by the Future of the Past Lab and the Center for Premodern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities that seeks to interrogate the lingering influence of Western assumptions in the study of cultural history and to imagine ways forward. The series will feature ten, week-long visiting fellowships grouped around three main themes related to the study of non-modern Cultural History: the transmission of evidence, the role of comparative work, and the influence of uniquely modern ontological premises. In the Spring last year of the series (2027), fellows will come together in Minneapolis for a conference to share their findings, which will then be published in an open access edited volume.
First Millennium: Religion in Late Antiquity Contacts: Andrea Sterk, and Jake Henke	The First Millennium: Religion in Late Antiquity workshop is devoted to the study of Late Antiquity, an age of transition from the classical world to the civilizations of early medieval Europe, Byzantium, and the Near East. This was the period during which Rome fell in the west, Germanic tribes migrated into Europe, Constantinople rose to prominence, the Sasanian dynasty ruled a vast Persian empire, and three great monotheistic religions took shape. Scholars have expanded the chronological and geographical boundaries of this era in recent years, and the workshop adopts this more expansive view of the period. We focus on topics ranging from roughly the third to the tenth century and extending from the Iberian peninsula in the west to central Asia in the east and from the British Isles in the north to Nubia, Ethiopia, and Arabia in the south. Within this broad expanse we address such themes as empire and religion, centers and peripheries, developments in philosophy and intellectual life, trade and migration, literature, art, archeology, and material culture. Religion, however, serves as the unifying theme of the workshop.
The Liberal Artisan Contacts: Krista Twu, Gil Tostevin, Lydia Garver	The Liberal Artisan reconnects labor and scholarship, the mind and the hand, and the material and the theoretical in a program fostering a way of being and working grounded in embodied communities of knowledge and skill. We resist contemporary forces of alienation, disembodiment, and social fragmentation by creating spaces to holistically and collaboratively address material, conceptual, and societal challenges. Our collaborative, based at the UMN Twin Cities and Duluth campuses, will draw on robust resources across the state of Minnesota to: Build a consortium of scholars, practitioners, and workers across our campuses and communities. Develop skills and expertise among UMN faculty and staff in production technologies, crafts, materials, and worker experiences through workshops with local practitioners and arts and labor organizations. Cultivate research and teaching integration in material and experiential methods through scholarly reading groups, symposia, and a curriculum development workshop. Foster student and staff communities of craft among the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Duluth campuses. Share experiential learning and University research with diverse campus and community audiences.
Medieval Books in the Schools Contacts: Anya Badaldavood, Lydia Garver, and Michelle Hamilton	An internal workshop dedicated to improving the center's current K-12 outreach curricula. We send graduate students into local classrooms and present on manuscript culture and material (book) production. These presentations are geared toward the K-8 classroom and include fun period clothing and authentic medieval book materials like inks, quills, and parchment. Medieval Academy of America Centennial Grant (2024) for "Virtual Medieval Books in the Schools" Michelle Hamilton and Maggie Heeschen
Premodern Food Lab Contacts: Michelle Hamilton, Emily Beck, Sara Gardner, Marguerite Ragnow, and Anne Good	The Premodern Food Lab explores primary texts and secondary scholarship on premodern food and foodways. They frequently collaborate with local food producers. The Premodern Food Lab is collaborating with Jewish Studies on a symposium on Jewish Food Cultures in November 2026.
Premodern Podcast Listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Contacts: Elijah Wallace	The Premodern Podcast is a cabinet of curiosities for the ears where scholars, librarians, and curators share thematic adventures in the historical humanities. The first season, entitled “I’ve Got a Thing,” is a series of conversations about the objects, documents, and stories that premoderists just can’t stop thinking about.
Premodern Workshop Contacts: Elizabeth Quillen and Stephan Knott	The Premodern Workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of graduate students and faculty to share and receive feedback on their works-in-progress. These works can take any format, ranging from seminar papers to dissertation chapters or conference presentations, and be on a topic relating to the premodern world, broadly defined in terms of chronology or geography. Each week, the presenting author precirculates their work ahead of time and the group discusses the work using our “Talking Behind Your Back” format, a unique staple of our workshop. This exercise is difficult for discussants and authors alike. It proceeds as do many discussions of work-in-progress, where discussants share their thoughts with the group, including points of interest, questions, and critiques. The difference is that the author is in the room but may not speak until the end of the discussion. The goal is to allow the work to speak for itself and for participants to engage with each other, allowing the author to see how a diverse group of people receives their work. Email [email protected] to join.
Religion, Theology & the Enlightenment Contact: Rachel Trocchio	Characterizations of the eighteenth century as the “Age of Enlightenment” presume a move to enlightenment that is defined as a move away from, or at least a marginalization of, matters religious and especially theological. This workshop brings together faculty and graduate students interested in the Enlightenment, religion, and theology entanglement to share research, read scholarship of common interest, and generally dialogue about this modern problematic.
Uncommon Bodies Contacts: Jennifer Row & Penelope Geng	This workshop explores art and literature, theories, and scholarship connected to embodiment, disability, corporeality, the allure of the flesh, and issues of physical and virtual embodiment. We engage readings and research-in-progress on abjection, empathy and virtual reality, genetic mutations/metamorphosis, legal and medical constructions of the body (including trans bodies), cultures of disability, body horror in film, seeing bodies in media, etc. These topics are considered both as they operate in the early modern and contemporary context. Follow them on Twitter at @uncommonbodies.

Title, Leader(s)

Focus

The Archive Project

Contacts: Juliette Cherbuliez and Michelle Hamilton

An archive is a site of cultural memory. It is defined by both what its contains and what it leaves out, whether intentionally or unintentionally. As Ann Stoler has explored, an archive is an epistemic space that, while promising proof texts and “truths” of the past, sometimes only offers vestiges of the violence that left the record to the victors, while the trace of the vanquished is lost.

How do we restore the traces of the vanquished, instrumentalised, and unheard? We aim to explore questions about what an archive is, what it has been and what it can be, as well as how has it been constructed and how we might prefer it be deconstructed or re-constructed. Guiding questions include: What kinds of knowledge have traditionally been included in premodern archives and how were and are such archives constructed, and, importantly for us as scholars today, who constructed and continues to construct as well as who worked with and in, and continues to work with and in such archives? What was not included or what has gone missing from such archives? How might we approach archives in novel ways to allow otherwise unheard voices to be located and considered?

Goals

Restore the epistemological complexity of the premodern world to our research habits by combining our modern disciplinary knowledge as we examine our objects of study;
Create productive dialogue and exchange information about archival study across a range of practices, by bringing together librarians, curators, archivists, scholars, and the curious public
Develop a set of best practices in new, predisciplinary approaches to the lost voices of the archive.

IAS Collaborative January 2024 - December 2025

DAAD Grant February 2026 - December 2027

Exploring Assumptions

Contact: Noah Segal

The lenses of Western modernity surreptitiously cause us to study non-modern cultures in ways that disregard their own claims about their world in favor of our own. The product of this problem is a colonialist narrative that presents premodern cultures as flawed or inconsistent (because they fail to meet modern criteria) and modern (usually Western) cultures as the resolution of these inconsistencies. Exploring the Assumptions of Cultural History is a three-year series (beginning in the 24-25 academic year) of visiting fellowships sponsored by the Future of the Past Lab and the Center for Premodern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities that seeks to interrogate the lingering influence of Western assumptions in the study of cultural history and to imagine ways forward. The series will feature ten, week-long visiting fellowships grouped around three main themes related to the study of non-modern Cultural History: the transmission of evidence, the role of comparative work, and the influence of uniquely modern ontological premises. In the Spring last year of the series (2027), fellows will come together in Minneapolis for a conference to share their findings, which will then be published in an open access edited volume.

First Millennium: Religion in Late Antiquity

Contacts: Andrea Sterk, and Jake Henke

The First Millennium: Religion in Late Antiquity workshop is devoted to the study of Late Antiquity, an age of transition from the classical world to the civilizations of early medieval Europe, Byzantium, and the Near East. This was the period during which Rome fell in the west, Germanic tribes migrated into Europe, Constantinople rose to prominence, the Sasanian dynasty ruled a vast Persian empire, and three great monotheistic religions took shape. Scholars have expanded the chronological and geographical boundaries of this era in recent years, and the workshop adopts this more expansive view of the period. We focus on topics ranging from roughly the third to the tenth century and extending from the Iberian peninsula in the west to central Asia in the east and from the British Isles in the north to Nubia, Ethiopia, and Arabia in the south. Within this broad expanse we address such themes as empire and religion, centers and peripheries, developments in philosophy and intellectual life, trade and migration, literature, art, archeology, and material culture. Religion, however, serves as the unifying theme of the workshop.

The Liberal Artisan

Contacts: Krista Twu, Gil Tostevin, Lydia Garver

The Liberal Artisan reconnects labor and scholarship, the mind and the hand, and the material and the theoretical in a program fostering a way of being and working grounded in embodied communities of knowledge and skill. We resist contemporary forces of alienation, disembodiment, and social fragmentation by creating spaces to holistically and collaboratively address material, conceptual, and societal challenges. Our collaborative, based at the UMN Twin Cities and Duluth campuses, will draw on robust resources across the state of Minnesota to:

Build a consortium of scholars, practitioners, and workers across our campuses and communities.
Develop skills and expertise among UMN faculty and staff in production technologies, crafts, materials, and worker experiences through workshops with local practitioners and arts and labor organizations.
Cultivate research and teaching integration in material and experiential methods through scholarly reading groups, symposia, and a curriculum development workshop.
Foster student and staff communities of craft among the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Duluth campuses.
Share experiential learning and University research with diverse campus and community audiences.

Medieval Books in the Schools

Contacts: Anya Badaldavood, Lydia Garver, and Michelle Hamilton

An internal workshop dedicated to improving the center's current K-12 outreach curricula. We send graduate students into local classrooms and present on manuscript culture and material (book) production. These presentations are geared toward the K-8 classroom and include fun period clothing and authentic medieval book materials like inks, quills, and parchment.

Medieval Academy of America Centennial Grant (2024) for "Virtual Medieval Books in the Schools" Michelle Hamilton and Maggie Heeschen

Premodern Food Lab

Contacts: Michelle Hamilton, Emily Beck, Sara Gardner, Marguerite Ragnow, and Anne Good

The Premodern Food Lab explores primary texts and secondary scholarship on premodern food and foodways. They frequently collaborate with local food producers. The Premodern Food Lab is collaborating with Jewish Studies on a symposium on Jewish Food Cultures in November 2026.

Premodern Podcast
Listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Contacts: Elijah Wallace

The Premodern Podcast is a cabinet of curiosities for the ears where scholars, librarians, and curators share thematic adventures in the historical humanities. The first season, entitled “I’ve Got a Thing,” is a series of conversations about the objects, documents, and stories that premoderists just can’t stop thinking about.

Premodern Workshop

Contacts: Elizabeth Quillen and Stephan Knott

The Premodern Workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of graduate students and faculty to share and receive feedback on their works-in-progress. These works can take any format, ranging from seminar papers to dissertation chapters or conference presentations, and be on a topic relating to the premodern world, broadly defined in terms of chronology or geography.

Each week, the presenting author precirculates their work ahead of time and the group discusses the work using our “Talking Behind Your Back” format, a unique staple of our workshop. This exercise is difficult for discussants and authors alike. It proceeds as do many discussions of work-in-progress, where discussants share their thoughts with the group, including points of interest, questions, and critiques. The difference is that the author is in the room but may not speak until the end of the discussion. The goal is to allow the work to speak for itself and for participants to engage with each other, allowing the author to see how a diverse group of people receives their work.

Email [email protected] to join.

Religion, Theology & the Enlightenment

Contact: Rachel Trocchio

Characterizations of the eighteenth century as the “Age of Enlightenment” presume a move to enlightenment that is defined as a move away from, or at least a marginalization of, matters religious and especially theological. This workshop brings together faculty and graduate students interested in the Enlightenment, religion, and theology entanglement to share research, read scholarship of common interest, and generally dialogue about this modern problematic.

Uncommon Bodies

Contacts: Jennifer Row & Penelope Geng

This workshop explores art and literature, theories, and scholarship connected to embodiment, disability, corporeality, the allure of the flesh, and issues of physical and virtual embodiment. We engage readings and research-in-progress on abjection, empathy and virtual reality, genetic mutations/metamorphosis, legal and medical constructions of the body (including trans bodies), cultures of disability, body horror in film, seeing bodies in media, etc. These topics are considered both as they operate in the early modern and contemporary context. Follow them on Twitter at @uncommonbodies.