PREMODERN - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- History of Science, Technology & Medicine
Professor Alia Goehr is a scholar of early modern Chinese literature, religion, and intellectual history. Her research and teaching interests include fiction and drama of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries; the interaction of literary and religious thought and practices; Chinese commentary traditions; and aesthetically mediated understandings of mind, corporeality, and the real. Her current book project, tentatively titled "Bodies of Truth: Jin Shengtan's Six Works of Genius" constitutes the first English-language monograph on Jin Shengtan 金聖歎 (1608-1661)-the nonpareil of early modern Chinese fiction and drama criticism-in over fifty years. "Bodies of Truth" reframes Jin's literary endeavors as an outgrowth of seventeenth-century Chinese experiments with literature's spiritual potential. By reading his commentary editions of great works, including the vernacular novel Water Margin and the song-drama Romance of the Western Chamber, alongside contemporaneous Buddhist and Neo-Confucian writings, this project reveals the philosophical and religious import of Jin's understanding of literary genius (cai 才) as an artistically skillful bodhisattva inhabiting the infinitely intersubjective Buddhist truth-body (fashen 法身, Skt. dharmakāya). In doing so, the book identifies an alternate (pre-modern, Chinese) historical basis for literary realism, which Jin Shengtan formulated as an antidote to both moral excess and moral authoritarianism, and, in turn, a gateway to a morally and politically functioning society.
Goehr is also in the early stages of research for two future book projects, including a study of Tang Xianzu's four dream plays and an examination of how Qing-dynasty commentators constructed an image of the late Ming as a period of literary and religious excess and imaginative overindulgence.
As an interdisciplinary scholar, Goehr is receptive to working with colleagues and students across disciplines, periods, and regions of expertise. She is an affiliate faculty in the Religious Studies program at the University of Minnesota and participates in workshops and conferences organized by the Center for Premodern Studies and Theorizing Early Modern Studies at UMN as well as the Association for Asian Studies, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the American Academy of Religion. She is also happy to collaborate with scholars based at institutions outside North America. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago in 2021, where she served as a Teaching Fellow until 2023. Her research has been supported by Princeton University Library, the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, and the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago.
Job Titles:
- Faculty Research Highlights ( Video )
- History of Early Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Race, and Africana Philosophy, With a Focus on the Philosophy of Anton Willhelm Amo ( C.1700 - C.1750 )
History of early modern philosophy, philosophy of race, and Africana philosophy, with a focus on the philosophy of Anton Willhelm Amo (c.1700-c.1750)
Job Titles:
- History of Early Modern Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
Anurag Sinha studies modern political thought, with interests in empire and colonization, the history of political economy, postcolonial political theory, and the politics and history of modern South Asia. His current research focuses on the intellectual legacies of eighteenth-century British state-building in India.
Job Titles:
- Chairman / Professorship at the University of Utrecht / the Netherlands, Fall 2008 - Spring 2009
Job Titles:
- UNIVERSITY of CAMBRIDGE. Associate Fellow., September 1978 - June 1979
Gabriela Currie received her B.A. in musicology from the Ciprian Porumbescu Conservatory in Bucharest, Romania and her M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University. Prior to her arrival at the University of Minnesota, she taught at the Eastman School of Music, New York University, and Cooper Union.
Her research interests and publications concern medieval music theory, the intersection between musical and scientific thought in the early- and pre-modern eras, music iconography in pre-modern Eurasia, and travel accounts as early ethnographies of musical traditions in Asia and Africa. She has received fellowships from the Balzan Foundation, Fondazione Caripario, National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association for University Women, and the Belgian-American Foundation.
Gabriela has presented at numerous national and international academic conferences such as American Musicological Society, International Musicological Society, Medieval Academy of America, History of Science Society, as well as the International Council for Traditional Music. She is the author of The Play of Meanings: Aribo's De musica and the Hermeneutics of Musical Thought, published in 2005, of Eurasian Musical Journeys: Five Tales (with Lars Christensen, contributor), published in 2022, and of numerous articles on subjects ranging from medieval musical cosmology to Eurasian music iconography and archaeology, which appeared in scholarly journals as well as edited collections. Current work includes several projects on the entanglement of musical thought, instruments, and practices in pre-modern Eurasia under the theoretical umbrella of intersections and intercultural exchanges in early globalities, and on early-modern European music ethnographic travel accounts (Persia, Central Asia, and West Africa)
Job Titles:
- Director of the Center for Austrian Studies
- History
Howard Louthan is director of the Center for Austrian Studies and professor of history at the University of Minnesota. He specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Central Europe with special attention to religion. His books include The Quest for Compromise, an examination of toleration in late-sixteenth century Vienna and Converting Bohemia, an exploration of the recatholization of the Czech lands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Along with Graeme Murdock (Trinity College Dublin) he recently published A Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe, which is the first full guide in English to the diverse Christian cultures of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Czech lands, Austria, and lands of the Hungarian kingdom between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. He is currently at work on a project that examines the religious cultures of sixteenth-century Poland. Before coming to Minnesota, Prof. Louthan taught at the University of Notre Dame, Warsaw University and the University of Florida.
Job Titles:
- History and Philosophy of Science / History and Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
Chair, James Russell Lowell Prize Committee: selecting best book of the year in literary criticism. Jan. 2013 - Dec. 2013
Job Titles:
- History of Science, Technology & Medicine
Job Titles:
- Director, Center for Premodern Studies / Professor, Department of French & Italian
Job Titles:
- History
- Union Pacific Trustee of Early Modern Studies
Kelley Harness' recent scholarly work concentrates on the interrelationships between music, theatrical imagery, and politics in 16th- and 17th-century Italy. Her work relies on musical analysis to reveal a composition's allegorical messages and combines archival research and interpretive models from literary criticism, art history, and anthropology; her teaching reflects this interdisciplinary approach. Harness wants her students to master various tools in order to penetrate the expressive and intellectual layers of specific musical works. She is the author of Echoes of Women's Voices: Music, Art, and Female Patronage in Early Modern Florence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), as well as numerous articles in journals and collections of essays. Her current research focuses on references to musical performance in 16th- and 17th-century Italian plays.
In 1994, she won the American Musicological Society's Paul A. Pisk Prize, and in 1991, she received a Fulbright Dissertation Grant for research in Italy. She is the recipient of publication subvention awards from the American Musicological Society and the Newberry Library.
Job Titles:
- Associate Director of the Center for Premodern Studies
- Associate Director, Center for Premodern Studies
Lydia Garver is the Associate Director of the Center for Premodern Studies where she supports an amazing community of faculty, staff, and students in their collective and individual engagements with the past. Her background is in historical archaeology, and she began working on digs for the State Museum of Pennsylvania as a high school student. Her research interests include early modern religion and consumer behavior, German Americans, material culture, archaeological ethics, and a longstanding obsession with art crime. You can hear her overthink a porcelain bowl with an interesting 18th-century, Philadelphia connection and argue why archaeologists should be opposed to time travel on the Premodern Podcast!
Lydia is also on the Advisory Board for the Heritage Studies and Public History Program.
Job Titles:
- Public Humanities Fellow
- Public Humanities Fellow, Center for Premodern Studies / Department of English
Job Titles:
- Research Fellowship, 1993 - None
- Research Grant, University of Minnesota, 1998
Job Titles:
- Distinguished University Teaching Professor and Professor
- History
Michael Lower is Morse Alumni Distinguished University Teaching Professor and Professor of History. He writes about the crusades, mercenaries, medieval Mediterranean history, soccer, and twentieth-century Jewish history. He grew up in Toronto and went to UTS for high school, then to Victoria College in the University of Toronto for a B.A. in history. He received a Ph.D. in medieval history in 1999 from Cambridge University, where he worked with David Abulafia and Jonathan Riley-Smith. Since 2000 he has taught in the history department at the University of Minnesota. In 2010-11, thanks to a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, he was fortunate enough to spend a year studying classical Arabic and early Islamic history at the University of Chicago. His more recent research on the crusades tries to bring together Arabic and European-language sources to tell the story of these complex multi-lateral conflicts from multiple perspectives. He is the author of "The Barons' Crusade of 1239: A Call to Arms and Its Consequences" (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) and "The Tunis Crusade of 1270: A Mediterranean History" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). He is currently working on a history of Hakoah Vienna, an all-Jewish soccer club that conquered Austrian football, beat the English at their own game, and defied the Nazis.
Michal Kobialka is an internationally recognized theatre historian and scholar. He has published over 100 articles, essays, and reviews as well as presented papers on medieval, eighteenth-century, and contemporary European Theatre.
His current research includes the investigation of representational practices as well as defining the nature of theatre/performance historiography. Additionally, he is focused on examining the temporal and spatial flaws and imperfections in the academic design for the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, which haunt the Euro-American academy.
To view Michal Kobialka's full bio, please select it from the links provided above.
Job Titles:
- Director of Medieval Studies
- Director, Center for Medieval Studies / Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies
- Trustee of Medieval Studies / Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese
Michelle M. Hamilton is Director of Medieval Studies and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities where she offers courses on religious studies, Jewish studies, and Spanish literature and culture. She has published widely on multi-confessional Iberia. Recent publications include Beyond Faith: Belief, Morality and Memory in a Fifteenth-Century Judeo-Iberian Manuscript (2014) and In and Of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies (2014). She is currently working on a project examining the intersections of translation, ruins and wonder in the Iberian Arabic and Romance traditions.
Current Position: Content Strategist, United Health Group
Nabil Matar studied English Literature at the American University of Beirut where he received his B.A. and M.A. In 1976, he completed his Ph.D. at Cambridge University on the poetry of Thomas Traherne. He taught at Jordan University and the American University of Beirut, and received postdoctoral grants from the British Council (Clare Hall, Cambridge University) and from Fulbright (Harvard Divinity School).
In 1986, Dr. Matar moved to the United States and started teaching in the Humanities Department at Florida Institute of Technology. In 1997, he became the Department Head and served until 2007 when he moved to the English Department at the University of Minnesota. He is Presidential Professor in the President's Interdisciplinary Initiative on Arts and Humanities and the Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities. He teaches in the departments of English and History, and in the Religious Studies Program.
Dr. Matar's research in the past three decades has focused on relations between early modern Britain, Western Europe, and the Islamic Mediterranean. He is author of numerous articles, chapters in books and encyclopedia entries. He completed a trilogy on Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 (Cambridge UP, 1998), Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia UP, 1999), and Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689 (UP of Florida, 2005). He wrote the introduction to Piracy, Slavery and Redemption (Columbia UP, 2001) and completed a second trilogy on Arabs and Europeans in the early modern world: In the Lands of the Christians (Routledge, 2003); Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578-1727 (Columbia UP, 2009); and An Arab Ambassador in the Mediterranean World (1779-1787)(Routledge, 2015). With Professor Gerald MacLean, he published Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713 (Oxford UP, 2011), and with Professor Judy Hayden, he edited a collection of essays on travel to the Holy Land in the early modern period: Through the Eyes of the Beholder: the Holy Land in Early Modern Imagination, Brill, 2012). He also edited, introduced, and annotated Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: ‘The Originall & Progress of Mahometanism,' (Columbia University Press, 2013), and completed British Captives in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 1563-1760 (Brill, Leiden, 2014). In 2018, he selected, introduced, and translated The United States through Arab Eyes: Anthology of Writings from Early Emigrants (1876-1914) (Edinburgh University Press).
Dr. Matar was Principal Investigator of, "Shared Cultural Spaces: Islam and the West in the Arts and Sciences," National Endowment of the Humanities Conference (24-26 February 2011) and in recognition of his "pioneering scholarship on the relationship between Islamic civilisation and early modern Europe," Dr. Matar was given the Building Bridges award at the University of Cambridge (28 March 2012). In 2017, he received the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences Award.
Many of Dr. Matar's books have been translated into Arabic and Turkish. His study guide on Islam (1992) has been translated into Chinese. For the past few years, Dr. Matar has been publishing on the impact of Catholic and Protestant missions on the Arab East between 1517 and 1797.
Job Titles:
- Research Interests
- Trustee of Ancient Studies / Professor, Department of Classical & Near Eastern Studies
Job Titles:
- Visiting Senior Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, DC, Summer 2012
Rebecca Krug specializes in late medieval English literature and culture. She is currently finishing a book about Margery Kempe. She has also been working on ideas about 'self-help' and emotional experience in the 14th and 15th centuries and on medieval gardens and gardening. Graduate students she has supervised have written dissertations about medieval gossip; sanctity and imitation; alliterative poetry and Troy; and women's speech and the law. Krug was awarded a GAPSA award for graduate advising (2012), the Red Motley Teaching Award at Minnesota (2007), and the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Harvard University (1998).
Job Titles:
- Visiting Professor in Art History, Williams College, 2023 - 2024
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Teacher Award, 2000 - 2002
Job Titles:
- Chairman in the Humanities, University of Minnesota, July 2017
Job Titles:
- Senior Research Fellowship, 2012 - 2013