Thematic Priorities

The Center has put forward a set of thematic priorities for a two-year cycle (AY 2023-24 and 2024-25):

• Ecology
• Knowledge
• Memory/Oblivion
• The Senses, Sovereignty/Empire
• Travel and Traveling Forms

Designed to encourage, rather than to limit, these themes offer resonant anchors for our work. They can be taken up as stand-alone themes or can be combined in different ways, e.g., Knowledge and Empire, Sovereignty vs. Empire, Knowledge and Senses. They are intended as large containers to be shaped according to specific interests. By way of example, and not limited to the above list, “Traveling Forms” can be about forms of travel, but also about music or architectural forms (on a different chronology, e.g., European vs. Spanish American “Renaissance”), lyric forms that did and did not travel (e.g., Occitan, Persian, Arabic), story, dance, and music forms that traveled across Central Asia and south-east Asia, different writing forms. Translation, technologies, religion, and economy can also be viewed from that perspective.