What connotations has the word “modernity”—and its correlates in other languages—acquired as it has circulated in and among different cultures?
How might other frameworks emerging from historically marginalized and oppressed groups, as well as the Global South, place pressure on assumptions underlying ideas about modernity that are associated with current and former imperial powers?
How have diverse literary genres, art forms, and media shaped and been shaped by their various modernities?
About
Redesigning Modernities is an initiative to encourage collaborative research and generate new curriculum devoted to exploring the divergences, inequalities, and unevenness (as well as the commonalities) that define modernity in different parts of the world.
The cornerstone of the project will be two week-long summer workshops held in 2020 and 2021, which will be led by distinguished visiting scholars and will bring together faculty as well as graduate and undergraduate students from a number of Penn State campuses to explore the project’s central theme.
Objectives
The project has three principle objectives:
To facilitate collaborative and complementary research agendas.
Short-term goals will include the publication of a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Comparative Literature Studies that will include contributions from participants in the seminars; in the longer term, we envision the summer seminars as incubators for future projects oriented toward additional specific or intersecting themes related to more fully diverse understandings of modernities.
To develop a new curriculum.
Participants will work on revising syllabi for existing courses and developing new courses around themes that emerge from the summer workshops and our discussions during the academic year, in order to expand Penn State’s curricular explorations of the divergences as well as commonalities among modernities in different parts of the world.
To create an archive of OER instructional materials.
In keeping with Penn State’s Open Education Resources initiative, participants will devise new materials for inclusion in an archive of open-access resources, designed as modules for supporting the curriculum emerging from the workshops and for flexible use in other courses. Guidance on OER aspects will be provided by the University Libraries’ OER librarian, who is a project member.