Global Geographies of Knowledge: Creating, Representing, and Commodifying Ideas Across Early Modern Places, 1400-1800

FAIN: EH-288009-22

St. Louis University (St. Louis, MO 63103-2097)
Claire Gilbert (Project Director: February 2022 to present)
Charles Henry Parker (Co Project Director: February 2022 to present)
Fabien Montcher (Co Project Director: February 2022 to present)

A four-week residential institute for 30 higher education faculty on knowledge and globalization in the early modern period.

"Global Geographies of Knowledge" enriches scholarship about the complex human, material, and ideological entanglements which characterized the first age of globalization. Drawing on historical geography and sociology; economic, legal, and literary history; and the intersections of the histories of art and science, our institute emphasizes how forms of knowledge conditioned and transformed perceptions of places. This framework reveals the global, polycentric dimension of how ideas were generated, refashioned, and transmitted. New courses and research projects will emerge from this Institute, along with innovative teaching modules on place and the construction of knowledge in world history surveys and upper-level undergraduate courses on empire, religious encounters, trade, travel, migration–coerced and free–and other forms of cultural interaction.