Rethinking The Age of Revolution: Rights, Representation, and the Global Imaginary is a 2013–2014 John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at Brandeis University. Led by Professors Jane Kamensky and Susan S. Lanser, the seminar focuses on the Atlantic revolutions in America, France, and Haiti within a broad historical and multidisciplinary framework.
This blog is a space where the seminar participants can continue the conversation outside of the seminar meetings and can expand the discussion beyond the Brandeis campus. Seminar participants will be posting about the readings, sources, conferences, new trends in the field, etc. Please join the discussion by commenting on the blog and by coming to the public events on campus. For a complete schedule see visit the Seminar website.
Focusing centrally on the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, this seminar explores, within an interdisciplinary framework, the multifaceted contours both of the era itself and of its vast scholarly and public aftermath. Drawing scholars of history, literature, art, philosophy, and political science as both speakers and participants, the seminar will also examine the particularities of framing this inquiry in the early twenty-first century, when the nation-state is arguably even less stable than it was during the revolutionary age that called it forth. Today’s emergent understandings of revolution, both on the page and in the street, open unexpected ways to think about this cataclysmic segment of the global past.