Workshop: New Ways of Looking at the World 2000-2003

For the first three years the Hill Center ran a yearly seminar for teachers, the aim of which was to bring critical scholarship dating from the late 1970s and after to the attention of teachers at all levels of educational practice. The term "critical scholarship"? here refers to the initiatives that grew out of the work of Edward Said, Michele Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and a host of other theoreticians, as historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, and art historians embraced the theoretical insights coming out of the "linguistic turn"? and applied them to their own areas of specialization. In the 4th year of the New Ways project we undertook some summary projects and inaugurated a series of separate workshops under the sponsorship of the Hill Center and partner institutions. With a few exceptions, most of what we provide here is in the form of bibliographies.

2000: Historiography and Historical Method
Click here to download 2000 program handout pdf. (148 KB)

Our scholars for year 1 were in Early American Colonial History (Karen Kupperman, NYU); African American Studies (Robin Kelley, NYU); Modern Japanese History (Louise Young, NYU); and History of India (Nicholas Dirks, Columbia University). A major goal of the seminar was to see whether scholars who specialized in different subjects and time periods shared critical methodologies. Can we discover shared methodological approaches by looking at historiography?

2001: Traditions
Click here to download 2001 program handout pdf. (148 KB)

Our scholars for year 3 were in African Anthropology (Christopher Steiner, Connecticut College); Modern History of India (Janaki Bakhle, Columbia University); Museum Studies (Diana Fane, Brooklyn Museum of Art); and Southeast Asian Studies (Laurie Sears, University of Washington). We looked at art objects, music history and musical and stage performances in colonial contexts in order to study how art productions are interpreted at the place where different groups of interpreters from the colonizing power and the colonized groups meet.

2002: On Violence
Click here to download 2002 program handout pdf. (61 KB)

Our scholars for year 3 were in Russian History (Peter Czap, Amherst College);
South Asian Anthropology (Val Daniel, Columbia University); Modern German History (Molly Nolam, NYU); and Modern African History (Nancy Jacobs, Brown University). In this seminar we looked at new scholarly material on memory and memorialization and on how seemingly paradigmatic events can shape historical constructions. Our inquires included an exploration of the kinds of violence inflicted in European colonies in the name of science.
Attach pdf reading list file

2003: The Afterlife of Workshops

Middle School Tutorial
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These book lists, themes, and case studies (to be developed) for middle school teachers are inspired by the idea that “as historical knowledge has grown over the last two or three decades, one group of people in the world no longer can speak with authority about all the other groups, because we can now hear their voices as well as the voices of dominant groups. We are becoming able to see the world in new ways, not only from one perspective. In the global world we now inhabit, working this new knowledge into what we teach will help our students to live more fully and more consciously in their world.”

Colonial Legacies
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These four sequence of ideas essays were written to serve as introductions to readings assigned by scholars for various Hill Center workshops. They deal with colonial elites in Cuzco, Peru (c. 1680); the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the life and work of the colonial administrator Colin Mackenzie in India (1783-1821), Javanese puppeteers in the 1920s and 1930s, and the work of Yi T’aejun, the 20th century Korean writer.

Environmental Violence
Click here to download program handout pdf. (244 KB)

These topical commentaries to provide a context for readings assigned for the section of Year 2 of the New Ways Seminar (see appropriate home page) in which the study of violence was extended from familiar European political and cultural contexts to the unfamiliar world of violence against animals and the landscape, particularly in examples provided for the study of South Africa.

Subaltern Studies
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Please note that this .pdf file will take several minutes to download.

These pages familiarize the reader with examples of the work of the Subaltern Studies group, drawing on the successive collections of essays which have appeared since the first volume in 1982. The discussions include contemporary illustrations, maps, and bibliographies.