Global Antiquities and Early Modernities

The Global Antiquities and Early Modernities faculty research cluster is a cross-disciplinary consortium that cultivates research and collaboration in historical fields from across the humanities and humanistic social sciences departments at the University of Washington. This research group will bring together colleagues working on topics relating to history, literature, textual studies, book history and material circulation, philology and language study, art history, intellectual and political history, and international studies within the University of Washington community, across the higher educational institutions of Washington state, and across our respective fields of study. 

This faculty consortium brings together scholars whose work spans periods from antiquity through the eighteenth century and ranges across England, Europe, the Near East, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Participants share a commitment to understanding texts, objects, and ideas within their historical and linguistic worlds while also tracing how those worlds intersect, circulate, and transform across boundaries of culture, region, and time. Participants engage a diverse array of interpretive and critical methods—from close philological and archival research, to digital and transnational approaches. The project's methodological pluralism models historically grounded yet globally attuned scholarship. Rather than treating their methods as timeless givens, the consortium shows how even philological, archival, and textual practices emerged in historically specific and socially embedded settings. Their collaborations aim to reimagine how texts, objects, and ideas moved across linguistic and regional boundaries—both in our individual work and in conversation with each other. In doing so, this research cluster will consider how texts and artifacts are produced, how knowledge is transmitted, and how power, region, language, and historical contexts shape what counts as archives and canons.