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As part of the Program in World Philology, John Whitman discusses "Glossing and Other Traces of Vernacular Reading." Cosponsored by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture. 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 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.

• Karin Barber, Professor of African Cultural Anthropology, University of Birmingham

As part of the Program in World Philology, Karin Barber discusses "Traditions of Exegesis: What Audiences do with Oral and Written texts in Africa."