The University Seminar in World Philology (USWP) aims to unite humanistic and social-scientific scholars across a range of 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 practice of making sense of texts. This history includes modern European projects explicitly called philology, as well as those belonging to older and more diverse textual traditions around the world. The USWP seeks to learn about these histories, simultaneously aware of the sordid colonial past of modern European philologies and philology-derived disciplines, and also of the elitism that characterized their precolonial antecedents the world over. The project of the USWP proposes to confront these inheritances openly as we move forward.
The USWP aims to bring together faculty from humanities and humanistic social science departments at Columbia and Barnard, as well as from other colleges and universities in the New York area.
