Working Groups

Current Working Groups

Archival Silences

The Archival Silences Working Group seeks to foster an interdisciplinary conversation centered around the limits, freedoms, frustrations and general complications presented by the many biases inherent in both past and present archival practice. Built on writing by academics, archivists, librarians, community activists and essayists, this group will have two aims: to establish the problem of archival silences and examine ways in which that problem has been reckoned with by various communities.

Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity

The Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity (CSLA) fosters interdisciplinary discussion and cooperation among University members who study the period extending from 200 to 800 CE in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

Comprised of specialists in history, classics, religion, art and archaeology, and Near Eastern studies, the CSLA provides a forum for discussion among students, faculty, visiting scholars, and members of the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton Theological Seminary. The committee also organizes a program of public lectures, often in collaboration with other departments and programs.

Comparative Antiquity

The Comparative Antiquity Research and Teaching Collaboration is a three-year Humanities Council Global Initiative to foster research and teaching toward a new paradigm of “global antiquity” that is extensive in geographical and chronological scope and inclusive in disciplinary participation and methodologies. The Initiative aims to transform the research and study of antiquity, broadly conceived, at Princeton, and provide a model for similar change elsewhere. At its heart is a faculty-graduate student reading group on the pre-1000 world focusing on connective scholarship   across the disciplines and comparison as a method and means of collaboration.

Comparative Diplomatics

Comparative Diplomatics is an exploratory workshop on documents in late antiquity and the middle ages with occasional forays into the modern era, as distinct from narrative and normative long-form texts. Its goal is twofold: to stimulate the production of new translations of late antique and medieval documentary sources that can be used in the classroom, and/or harvest some of the translations already being made; and to bring languages, subfields and approaches into contact in order to clarify methodological questions.

Early Modern History Workshop

The Early Modern History Workshop (EMH) is a seminar series for Princeton students and faculty interested in the study of early modern history. The series brings together a community of early modernists that transcends common subdivisions in this field. The series provides graduate students with a forum in which to present works-in-progress, grant applications, research papers, and dissertation papers.

Rare Book Working Group

The Rare Book Working Group meets regularly throughout the academic term for presentations, teaching sessions, and off-campus events open to all Princeton students and faculty interested in the history of books and printing from the early modern through contemporary periods. Topics include binding identification and research into print and manuscript fragments, the bookselling trade, material evidence of production costs, women’s book production and ownership, and print illustration.

Textuality, Materiality, and Reading Practices

Textuality, Materiality and Reading Practices is a working group comprised of faculty and graduate students within the humanities to stimulate discussion among scholars from across different academic disciplines, with different geographical and temporal foci, that work on textual materiality and learn from each other. The workshop provides an interdisciplinary forum to foster scholarship that explores the entangled histories of reading and its artifacts. We ask such questions as: What does reading and its artifacts look like from a panoptic but kaleidoscopic vista? How does reading, textuality and materiality preserve tradition and innovate change?