Video / Audio  Heyman Center

In the early modern period, the emergence of travel as a means of information gathering on natural history, demography, government, and religion was accompanied by the use of questionnaires to orient observation. This conference investigates the development of techniques of information gathering of this kind and the networks on which they relied. Papers address the integral role of travel in the process of scientific exchange as well as to the ways that information itself traveled in British, French, Spanish, and Swedish contexts. The conference is supported by generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (mellon.org) and by the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, with the assistance of the Moore Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway. The “Texts, Contexts, Culture” project is funded under the Higher Education Authority, under PRTLI4.

In the early modern period, the emergence of travel as a means of information gathering on natural history, demography, government, and religion was accompanied by the use of questionnaires to orient observation. This conference investigates the development of techniques of information gathering of this kind and the networks on which they relied. Papers address the integral role of travel in the process of scientific exchange as well as to the ways that information itself traveled in British, French, Spanish, and Swedish contexts. The conference is supported by generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (mellon.org) and by the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, with the assistance of the Moore Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway. The “Texts, Contexts, Culture” project is funded under the Higher Education Authority, under PRTLI4.

In the early modern period, the emergence of travel as a means of information gathering on natural history, demography, government, and religion was accompanied by the use of questionnaires to orient observation. This conference investigates the development of techniques of information gathering of this kind and the networks on which they relied. Papers address the integral role of travel in the process of scientific exchange as well as to the ways that information itself traveled in British, French, Spanish, and Swedish contexts. The conference is supported by generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (http://www.mellon.org) and by the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, with the assistance of the Moore Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway. The “Texts, Contexts, Culture” project is funded under the Higher Education Authority, under PRTLI4.

Raja Shehadeh’s lecture on the 10th anniversary of Edward Said’s death will reflect on the cages of categorization that imprison Palestinians in contemporary Palestine perhaps more than even the physical matrix of borders, checkpoints, and the Wall. Shehadeh will explore how Palestinians themselves deploy these categories in a language of despair in our post-Oslo landscape, as well as a search for a new language, remembering as Edward Said noted in one of his most moving and lyrical texts, After the Last Sky, that “We are more than someone else’s object.”

In the early modern period, the emergence of travel as a means of information gathering on natural history, demography, government, and religion was accompanied by the use of questionnaires to orient observation. This conference investigates the development of techniques of information gathering of this kind and the networks on which they relied. Papers address the integral role of travel in the process of scientific exchange as well as to the ways that information itself traveled in British, French, Spanish, and Swedish contexts. The conference is supported by generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (mellon.org) and by the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, with the assistance of the Moore Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway. The “Texts, Contexts, Culture” project is funded under the Higher Education Authority, under PRTLI4.

Raja Shehadeh’s lecture on the 10th anniversary of Edward Said’s death will reflect on the cages of categorization that imprison Palestinians in contemporary Palestine perhaps more than even the physical matrix of borders, checkpoints, and the Wall. Shehadeh will explore how Palestinians themselves deploy these categories in a language of despair in our post-Oslo landscape, as well as a search for a new language, remembering as Edward Said noted in one of his most moving and lyrical texts, After the Last Sky, that “We are more than someone else’s object.”

Professor Evelyn Fox Keller, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, Emerita at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave a talk entitled, "Common Threads: Forging Parts from Wholes in Mathematical Biology, Feminist Theory, and Philosophy of Biology." 

Authors Colm Tóibín and Julie Orringer discussed the topic of “Family Novels" with Deborah Cohen, Professor of History at Northwestern.