Welcome
From the Director, Marjorie Rubright
Founded in 1998, the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies advances research in the early modern humanities by cultivating cultures of collaboration. Our mission is to develop multicultural, diverse, and timely programming that fosters the best of interdisciplinary engagement in the humanities and forecasts its future course. We are governed by three goals: 1) to develop and disseminate cutting edge interdisciplinary research into the literatures, history, and cultures of the early modern period (ca. 1400-1700) and its global afterlives; 2) to integrate our scholarly research initiatives with the academic offerings at the University and the Five Colleges, developing and expanding both traditional curricular and experiential learning opportunities at the intersection of disciplines; 3) to generate and foster creative and educational public-facing programming that invites students and the public to explore the legacies of early modern literature, history, science, cultural, and artistic production in our world today and to mobilize this knowledge to shape more just and livable futures.
We have embarked in a new direction responsive to our mission statement and to the questions that join humanists with scientists, academics with the public, and the past to our present and future. The Renaissance of the Earth project revolutionizes what it means to engage the early modern past with questions about our environmental future. Through a range of cross-disciplinary collaborative models, it puts students, artists, and scholars at the center of an interdisciplinary research mandate with the goal of discovering diverse avenues for creating sustainable and equitable life. The project includes a series of research collaborations, carefully scaffolded undergraduate and graduate courses, integrative learning workshops, pre-professional training opportunities, conferences, keynotes, and public-facing arts programming.
Scholars of the premodern world have been at the vanguard of environmental history and eco-criticism in the humanities, exploring how presentist conversations regarding environmental disaster, sustainability, and resilience traffic in ideas, metaphors, and modes of thinking whose roots extend into the Renaissance. The mission of The Renaissance of the Earth is to go further: organizing collaborative research across interdisciplinary scholarly communities and the public to consider how early modern habits of thought and practice might aid in imagining alternative forms of habitation and cultivation of the earth. Crucially, we are committed to exploring those connections that present us with the most challenging legacies: extractive colonialism, racism, forced human migration, and the asymmetries of environmental devastation around the globe.
I invite you to explore our current and upcoming programs and welcome you to contact me with suggestions for future events.
Quick Links