Keywords Symposium

Wolf Humanities Center • University of Pennsylvania

2024–2025 FORUM ON KEYWORDS

In conjunction with the Wolf Humanities Center’s 2024–2025 Forum on Keywords, this symposium engages mobile concepts and their genealogies, histories, structures of meaning, translations, and adaptations across time and space. In three panels curated around the Raymond Williams keywords of “Aesthetics,” “Imperialism,” and “Humanity,” we focus on themes that drive cultural and social concepts and inspire global interlocution across languages, perspectives, and temporalities.

As we gear up to celebrate the anniversary of Williams’ foundational book "Keywords," we will reflect on how generative the use of keywords remains while also adding to and challenging the original vocabulary. We hope to make Williams’ process applicable for the twenty-first century and fruitful for the questions scholarship is grappling with today.

Join us as scholars from the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts expand upon—and challenge—some of Williams’ categories.

Symposium organized by the Wolf Humanities Center's 2024–2025 Research Associate Angelina Eimannsberger; Doctoral Fellows Jacob Myers, Paige Pendarvis, Jennifer Reiss, and Jeremy Steinberg; and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows Maryam Athari, Usmon Boron, Lama Elsharif, Charlotte Kiechel, and Paniz Musawi Natanzi.

10:00 am–10:15 am
Welcome Remarks

• , Director, Wolf Humanities Center; Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the Humanities; Professor of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
• , Topic Director, Forum on Keywords, Wolf Humanities Center; Professor of Anthropology and History, University of Pennsylvania

10:15 am–11:45 am
Imperialism
Moderator: Paniz Musawi Natanzi, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center

• , Professorial Lecturer, Peace, Human Rights & Cultural Relations, American University
• , Associate Professor, South Asian History, Lafayette College
• , Assistant Professor, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Duke University

1:00 pm–2:30 pm
Humanity
Moderator: Jacob Meyers, Doctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center

• , Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures, Ella Darivoff Director of the Katz Center of Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania
• , Associate Professor, English, Georgetown University
• , Assistant Professor, Musicology, Mead Witter School of Music, University of Wisconsin

2:45 pm–4:30 pm
Aesthetics
Moderator: TBD

• , Associate Professor, Peace and Conflict Studies and Anthropology, Swarthmore University
• , Associate Professor, Art History, Karl Kilinksi II Endowed Chair in Hellenic Visual Culture, Southern Methodist University
• , W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies, Art History, University of Pennsylvania

4:30 pm
Closing Remarks

, Research Associate, Wolf Humanities Center; Ph.D. Candidate, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania

5:00 pm–6:30 pm
Keynote

, Associate Professor, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University. Moderated by Maryam Athari, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center

6:30 pm–7:30 pm
Reception

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Van Pelt Library, 3420 Walnut St, Philadelphia, United States