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| Posted 05.15.08 |
Annual Workshop Explores Jewish Culture through Early Literature
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 Associate
Professor of History Magda Teter has received a $14,000 grant from the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University to help with the operating costs
of the sixth annual Early Modern Workshop (EWM) in summer 2009. The workshop
will explore the topic of “History of Reading across Cultures: The Jewish
Book and Its Readers in Early Modern Europe.”
The workshop seeks to form collaborative interaction between scholars of
Jewish history, early modern history and literature and to facilitate
cross-fertilization of ideas between them. Workshop participants will be
examining how Jewish readers coped with the advent of the printing press
and what the areas of direct or indirect interaction between Jewish and
Christian readers were, according to Teter, who is the director of the EWM
project.
The 2009 workshop will be co-sponsored by Wesleyan and Harvard’s Jewish
Studies Program, along with other institutions to be named, and will be held
at the Radcliffe Institute.
Every workshop held since the first EMW (hosted at Wesleyan in 2004) has
proven successful, Teter says.
“Participants of the first workshop were surprised at the level of
interaction and discussion, the give and take was much more dynamic than at
a typical conference when a paper is presented following a question and answer
session,” she says.
The format of the workshops is what makes them stand out.
“Instead of asking scholars to prepare papers, we asked them to prepare
primary documents in the original language and in the English translation
and present these texts in a seminar format,” Teter says.
The text of the documents is available on the EMW website,
http://www.earlymodern.org/,
along with videos of the workshops. The submitted texts are searchable.
Teter edits all of the workshop videos for content. She credits Manolis
Kaparakis, academic computing manager for the Social Sciences and director
of the Quantitative Analysis Center, and others at Information Technology
Services with helping to make sure that all of the videos and text updates
are available on the website in a timely manner.
This year’s workshop is “Law: Continuity and Change in the Early Modern
Period."
“The Early Modern Workshop certainly put Wesleyan on the map as one of the
main players in innovative scholarly communication and in Jewish studies,”
she says.
“The workshop helped consolidate a field that was not recognized widely in
Jewish studies: the early modern period. Traditionally, Jewish history was
divided into Biblical, ancient, medieval, and modern. Those of us who worked
on the sixteenth century were lumped as 'medieval,' those of us who worked
on early eighteenth century were labeled 'modern.' We did not have
opportunities to talk to each other, no conference panel would ever put us
together, so the Early Modern Workshop became a venue for us to meet and
talk, at the same time creating a wonderful Internet resource. The Early
Modern Workshop created a fantastic opportunity to bridge research and
pedagogy.”
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By Corrina Balash Kerr, associate director of
media relations |
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