This research project seeks to understand the process of becoming urban at a critical time in Cambodian history. Combining traditional and distributed ethnographic methods, the research team will explore and analyze the lived experiences of migrants from rural villages to urban centers; the economic, environmental, and social factors that drove the decision to migrate; and the changing connections to place, space, and people that result from becoming urban. Ultimately, the project aims to produce a deeper understanding of the lived experience of migrants and a better account of their transformation from villagers to urbanites.

CEDAR is a multi-project digital humanities initiative involving literary corpora that have complex histories of composition, revision, and dissemination. The first phase of the project focused on three corpora written in different historical periods using very different languages and scripts. The initial projects involved the Gilgamesh Epic, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare’s plays. This phase adds four more projects: one ancient, on the Egyptian Book of the Dead; one medieval, on the Middle English poem Piers Plowman; one modern, on the works of Herman Melville; and a project on indigenous American sign systems that is not easily categorized under traditional rubrics of Western literature. This diverse and growing group of projects demonstrates the practical benefits of a shared computational platform for scholarly research and the corresponding intellectual benefits of jointly addressing a shared conceptual challenge faced by scholars in very different fields. The challenge is to design digital editions of literary works that preserve the hard-won achievements of traditional philology but open these works to new readings and new modes of analysis. CEDAR does this via a state-of-the-art database representation of both the internal epigraphic and discursive structures of texts, in all their complexity, and their external relations with one another and with other cultural media through time and space. By the end of Phase Two, CEDAR will be ready to welcome scholars in all fields to contribute to a new University of Chicago series of online critical editions.

To learn more, please visit the CEDAR website.

​

This project continues the work of the Making Progress on Death project by supporting a Visiting Fellowship for John Lizza, who served as the keynote speaker at the earlier project's 2021 conference. During his residency Lizza will continue the work that the research team has been doing with the goal of publishing a book on death and helping to complete a manuscript related to the intersection between medical and philosophical aspects of death. He will be on sabbatical leave from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, where he is a Professor of Philosophy, during Spring Term 2023 (January – May 2023). His fellowship at the Neubauer Collegium will coincide with the time of his sabbatical leave. The research team is also aspiring to distill particular points of disagreement from the presentations at the 2021 conference, with the further goal of reconvening participants for discussion of those issues in early 2023. The aim is to see if the group can work towards or achieve consensus on any points.

This interdisciplinary (as well as national and transnational) project seeks to recover a new understanding of the relationship between democracy and capitalism in history from the late 18th century age of revolution to the culmination of late 20th century neoliberalism. The research team asserts that existing accounts of capitalism and democracy feature a problematic over-reliance on liberalism and economism in the literatures on economic history, the history of capitalism, law and economics, law and society, democratic theory, and democratic studies more generally. By foregrounding the priority of democracy and the interdependence and intersectionality of histories of capitalism and democracy, the project aims to construct an alternative to reigning political-economic orthodoxies that have fueled so many contemporary crises. The research team will engage diverse scholars across a range of disciplines for a multi-year collaboration and conversations re-assessing the fundamental relationship of modern democracy and capitalist development and its future possibilities.

The Entanglements of the Indian Past project aims to make the study of the Indian past more self-conscious of the forces that have shaped it. A three-year series of interdisciplinary workshops will focus on three issues where serious engagement is critical: caste, materiality, and historicality. The project pairs each of these issues with a crossroad moment in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century that determined the course that the study of the Indian past would take: Rahul Sankrityayan’s quest for a past that mirrored his commitments to justice and equality in the present, Muni Jinavijaya’s efforts to free Indian thought from the limitations of manuscript textuality, and Georg Bühler’s vision of recovering the history of a country that, according to a commonplace, “has no history.” Each of these moments reveals the intensity of political commitment, and the depth of vision, involved in studying the Indian past. This project will attempt to answer where such scholarship might go in the future.

What is the relationship between capitalism and fossil fuels? So far the leading answers to this hotly debated question have claimed as universal the experiences of rich former imperial powers. This project instead centers the economic trajectories and energy systems of postcolonial societies in the Global South. The research team and visiting speakers will range across the planet – from the Americas to India, the Middle East to East Asia – to explore fossil capitalism on different scales, from the operations of national oil companies and multinational energy corporations to the racial violence that fractures labor mobilizations on and under the ground. Such cases promise to clarify the relations between carbon energy and socioeconomic power. Here, they detail the long histories of (neo)colonial extractivism that shape contemporary geopolitical relations and antagonisms. At the same time, they foreground the challenges and dilemmas posed by the twin revolutions of decolonization and democratization. This reframing of fossil capitalism raises new questions about the relationship between state sovereignty, popular expectations, and the hierarchical structures that underpin the international energy order. In the Global South, the dilemma of balancing economic development against ecological harm is posed with existential sharpness in a moment of accelerated climate catastrophe. Drawing together insights from history, anthropology, energy humanities, and political ecology, this project will trace new accounts of the forces holding the fossil economy in place. Moreover, it will reveal alternative paths and nodes of resistance to offer innovative visions of post-fossil futures.

This interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeologists and geneticists will enhance ancient DNA research at the University of Chicago and spur the development of a curriculum in archaeogenetics to bridge the gap between these two disciplines. An “ancient DNA revolution” is occurring in archaeology and ancient history because of new laboratory and statistical methods for extracting and analyzing DNA from ancient skeletal remains. These new methods have enabled the reconstruction of thousands of complete genomes from ancient specimens found in a wide range of geographical and chronological contexts. These genomes provide striking evidence of ancient population migrations, often challenging archaeologists’ long-held ideas about cultural change. The project will analyze DNA from ancient human remains excavated in the Middle East in order to reconstruct population movements and assess the prevailing explanations for cultural change in the Bronze Age civilizations of this region. This requires close collaboration and frequent discussions between geneticists and archaeologists of the kind the research team intends to demonstrate in this project. A series of workshops and an international conference will foster discussions of how ancient DNA results can best contribute to the construction of historical narratives. In light of concerns about biological reductionism and what some see as the implied racism of genetic studies, the project will seek viable ways of conceptualizing the relationship between genetic variation, cultural and linguistic similarities and differences, and the social construction of ethnicity and group solidarity.

This project seeks to uncover “invisible landscapes”—massive, multi-scalar, and multi-temporal human manipulations of the environment that archaeologists have long struggled to visualize, document, and understand. Since the advent of their discipline, archaeologists have occasionally caught glimpses of scattered anthropogenic interventions on otherwise seemingly undisturbed landscapes. Recent technological and methodological advances have revealed the previously unimagined scale and complexity of human impacts on those landscapes: enormous cities hidden beneath jungle canopies in the Americas and Southeast Asia, ubiquitous networks of sophisticated water management features that facilitated agriculture in Arabia, meticulously curated gardens in the “pristine” Amazonian rainforest. Bringing together a core team of three archaeologists and a dozen scholars, scientists, architects, and artists, this project investigates the causes behind the “invisibility” of such landscapes and offers potential ways to reimagine archaeologists' “sight.” More importantly, it also incites discussions about the theoretical implications of these previously unseen landscapes and about the new forms of disciplinary collaborations that their inspection demands. Combining field research with collaborative dialogue, the researchers aim not only to capture and analyze hitherto unseen complex anthropogenic assemblages, but to question what the objects of archaeology are and suggest possibilities regarding what they can be.

Once a part of military science, logistics—that is, the management of moving people, things, and information—has transformed into a more general condition of globalized mobility politics. On the one hand, innovation in commodity chain logistics has “revolutionized” how goods are produced, distributed, and consumed as well as how labor, land, and infrastructures are organized to support an increasingly on-demand global economy. On the other hand, logistical failures or interruptions—for example, in the mismanagement of refugee processing and detention at the U.S. southern border, the malfunctioning of Amazon’s web services for businesses, or the shortage of masks and ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic—have sparked various political, economic, and public health “crises.” Such crises bring public attention to the importance of logistics in shaping global flows and economic interdependence, as well as inequality and precarity that logistical expansion and interruption reproduce.

This research project seeks to use logistics as a lens through which to innovate new theories and methodological approaches for understanding the entangled nature of contemporary mobile worlds. The research team will do this by comparing cases for managing global circulation across three distinct kinds of flows—that is, of people, data, and things. Rather than just following “the flows” of global circulation, the project offers logistics as a means for getting at the hidden pragmatic designs and coordinating agencies that make the regional and transnational patterns of mobility and immobility intelligible in the first place. A focus on logistics demands closer attention not just to what happens when people, goods, or information arrive at their destination but how they get there via distinct yet often overlapping, hidden pathways of mediation.

By investigating the pervasive but often obscured work of logistics in the organization of various global flows in people, things, and data, this project will not only open up the black box of technopolitical knowledge and practices that constitute “logistics” for new comparative research. It will also stimulate new theoretical agendas and methodological innovations by gathering researchers of diverse expertise and regional affiliation for collaborative experiments in and beyond the academic setting. Alongside workshops, study group meetings, and collaborative art exhibitions, the research team will host several experimental “field schools” on logistics across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Americas to engage with cases that vary widely in terms of geographic location, scale, and formal research object. The research materials will be shared in various mediums, including an interactive online platform, A Field Guide to Logistics, for exchanging meso-level research findings and for showcasing diverse audiovisual forms of representation.