UTM researchers spearhead global humanities project

Two professors at UofT Mississauga are uniting scholars at UofT and across the world with funding from a Connaught Global Challenge Award to reinvigorate humanities research 

How should humanities scholars approach research and what does this inquiry look like in a post-pandemic world?

UTM Principal Investigators Professors Ajay Rao from the Department of Historical Studies and Jill Caskey from the Department of Visual Studies are currently leading a team of 21 multidisciplinary scholars, 15 based at UofT and six international partners from institutions based in Singapore, Egypt, and India, who are focused on research collaboration.

“The Global Past is a call-to-action for scholars of the premodern world, studying material or histories before circa 1500, to begin building a productive framework for research, teaching, and graduate training that is focused on the connectedness of cultures and archives,” says Caskey, current Chair of Visual Studies at UTM.

“Our objective with the project is to revitalize the global humanities. By providing a more expansive understanding of the core questions of the humanities and a focus on what it means to be human, we are aiming to break free of traditional disciplinary boundaries and embrace non-Western and Indigenous ways of knowing, producing transformative knowledge in order to be a truly global university.”

Participating researchers based at UTM include Professors Alex Gillespie (English and Drama) and Maria Hupfield (cross-appointed to Visual Studies and English and Drama), Ruba Kana’an (Visual Studies), and Karen Ruffle (Historical Studies).

The research initiative is defined by three central research clusters: Mobility considers the shifting of goods, ideas, and peoples and could encompass things like narratives of pilgrimage or travel diaries; Art and the Built Environment focuses on various aspects (techniques, media, artists) of architecture and art in premodern Eurasia; and Storytelling, Narrative and Textuality explores the science of texts in the global humanities and modes of cultural communication in oral and written narrative traditions. Over the duration of the two-year project, the team will organize three thematic, hands-on international workshops (in Toronto, Egypt, and Singapore) in order to establish the network and deepen the collaborations among participating scholars and graduate students.

“Graduate student research exchange is also an integral part of the Global Past project,” says Rao, UTM’s Vice-Dean, Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs.

“The workshops we have planned with our research partners around the globe will help to build the foundations for graduate student mobility between Global South universities and the University of Toronto. We are also aiming to establish a new talent pipeline to attract students to grad programs at UofT, as well as create diverse training opportunities for doctoral students to gain expertise from supervisors here and abroad.”

The research outputs for the project are also varied: from blogs, podcasts and vlogs to collaborative reflections that chronicle participants’ experiences and document the research activities. The project will also culminate in a Global Past Manifesto that will be collaboratively written and published in an open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal.

“Instead of preparing an edited volume of specialized, discipline-specific research, this shared manifesto will bring together the range of expertise of participants in the project,” says Caskey.

“The Global Past Manifesto will integrate theoretical frameworks and methodologies to propose concrete changes in humanities scholarship, and this will also provide the opportunity for mentorship of junior faculty and graduate students. We will also propose new ways to conduct research, moving beyond accepted limits of knowledge.”