The Program in World Philology (PWP) aims to unite Columbia scholars across departments and schools around the discipline-based study of texts. Philology, defined over the course of its history as everything, from text criticism to “slow reading” to “all erudition in language,” is at its base the discipline of making sense of texts. Under this description, philology is almost as old as the production of written texts themselves. Over time it has proven to be as central to knowledge as mathematics or philosophy, and its methods, like theirs, have similarly been adopted in other disciplines.
Sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, with support from the Heyman Center for the Humanities. 